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Barbara Bennett:

Mayor of Reno and Community Activist

Interviewee: Barbara Bennett
Interviewed: 1988
Published: 1989
Interviewer: Lenore M. Kosso
UNOHP Catalog #150

Description

Barbara Bennett was born in 1923 in Oakland, California. Her oral history begins with a heartbreaking description of
her early years there. Despite poverty, ill-treatment and neglect she survived and became more resilient, independent
and strong. She describes leaving home at the age of thirteen and becoming self-supporting. She worked for caring
people who insisted that she complete her education. College plans didn’t work out because of World War II, and
Barbara Bennett went to work in Bay Area defense plants. When the war ended she lost her job and her independence,
like so many other women, to returning servicemen. She realized that it was a “man’s world” at that time.

She married John Bennett, a returning serviceman, and continued to live in Oakland, where she and John started
their family—two daughters and a son. Their family was first and foremost in her life, and no decisions affecting the
family were made unilaterally. In 1964 the Bennetts moved to Reno, and Barbara went to work for the telephone
company. While she scored well on company examinations, she was unsuccessful in getting promotions. This
experience, among others, led her to become interested in issues and causes. This was when affirmative action for
minorities was beginning, but before people over forty had started organizing over age-related injustices in the
workplace.

In 1970, armed with statistics proving discrimination, Bennett again applied for a promotion, but to no avail.
While she had what was probably a winning case of discrimination in court, she couldn’t afford to fight it, and she
eventually left the phone company. Since then the company has made strides in improving conditions for women
in her age bracket; her determination and plain stubbornness helped bring about changes to benefit other people.

Injustice to herself and to others eventually led Barbara Bennett to become active in women’s issues and ultimately
to be instrumental in forming the Nevada Women’s Political Caucus. The Equal Rights Amendment was at the
forefront of women’s issues, and the Women’s Political Caucus wanted to secure male and female candidates who
grasped the issues of women in the workplace and women in their homes. Through these efforts, the city of Reno
and Washoe County had female members on various boards, and eventually had several women city and county
commissioners.

Nevada’s racial minorities are another group whose lives have been touched because Barbara Bennett couldn’t stand
the injustices meted out to them. She describes her feeling when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.
Once more she marched on another cause and fought racial discrimination in housing and jobs.

In the early 1970s, the Bennetts moved from their house into a mobile home—they wanted a home they could
afford in retirement. Unfortunately, mobile home park landlords in Nevada became greedy, forcing some retirees
out of their mobile homes because of “atrocious” increases in rates for space. Barbara Bennett founded the Nevada
Homeowners Association, and through this group righted many of the wrongs.

(Continued on next page.)

Description (continued)

By this time, Barbara Bennett had attained the name recognition necessary to run for public office. Hers was a name
not always popular with special interest groups, but she had a public profile. Bennett ran for county commissioner
in 1975 and was defeated. In 1977, she ran for Reno City Council and lost again, but in 1979 she ran for mayor of
Reno and won. Barbara Bennett was a formidable opponent at all times because she was so well prepared for the
task at hand. She was honest and the people knew it; even her opponents acknowledged that she had no price tag.
Bennett opposed the enormous campaign contributions provided by special interest groups, and accepted none.
She was truly of the people.

In this oral history Mrs. Bennett provides a detailed history of the problems Washoe County and Reno faced in the
1970s to 1980s. She is exceptionally candid in her descriptions of the people she encountered along the way and
the people she worked with as an elected official. Barbara Bennett has long been affiliated with Common Cause,
both locally and nationally, and has brought a lot of pride to members of the organization. She has received formal
recognition of her good work at local and national levels.

In his 1820 sketch, “The Wife,” Washington Irving wrote: “There is in every true womans heart a spark of heavenly
fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark
hour of adversity.” Mr. Irving must have known someone very much like Barbara Bennett when he was inspired
to write those words.

Barbara Bennett:

Mayor of Reno and Community Activist

Barbara Bennett:

Mayor of Reno and Community Activist

An Oral History Conducted by Lenore M. Kosso
Edited by Helen M. Blue and R.T. King

University of Nevada Oral History Program

University of Nevada Oral History Program
Mail Stop 0324
Reno, Nevada 89557
unohp @unr. edu
http: / / www. unr. edu/ oralhistory

Publication Staff:

Director: R.T. King
Publications Editor: Helen M. Blue
Text Production: Linda I. Sommer, Kay M. Stone,
Donna Duke-Koelfgen, Sabina Spielvogel

University of Nevada Oral History Program Use Policy

All UNOHP interviews are copyrighted materials. They may be downloaded and/or
printed for personal reference and educational use, but not republished or sold. Under
“fair use” standards, excerpts of up to 1000 words maybe quoted for publication without
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cited. The citation should include the title of the work, the name of the person or
people interviewed, the date of publication or production, and the fact that the work
was published or produced by the University of Nevada Oral History Program (and
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publication, or to use any photos found within the transcripts, should be addressed
to the UNOHP, Mail Stop 0324, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV 89557-0324.
Original recordings of most UNOHP interviews are available for research purposes
upon request.

Contents

Preface to the Digital Edition vii

Original Preface ix

Introduction xi

1. Formative Years 1

2. Marriage, Family, and Employment 9

3. Becoming a Political Activist 15

4. County Commission and City Council Campaigns 25

5. Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981 33

6. With the Nevada Youth Services, Common Cause, and the Ethics Commission 67

7. Reflections on Nevada Politics 75

8. Epilogue 81

Original Index: For Reference Only 89

Preface to the Digital Edition

Established in 1964, the University of
Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP)
explores the remembered past through
rigorous oral history interviewing, creating a
record for present and future researchers. The
programs collection of primary source oral
histories is an important body of information
about significant events, people, places,
and activities in twentieth and twenty-first
century Nevada and the West.

The UNOHP wishes to make the
information in its oral histories accessible
to a broad range of patrons. To achieve
this goal, its transcripts must speak with
an intelligible voice. However, no type font
contains symbols for physical gestures and
vocal modulations which are integral parts
of verbal communication. When human
speech is represented in print, stripped of
these signals, the result can be a morass of
seemingly tangled syntax and incomplete
sentences—totally verbatim transcripts
sometimes verge on incoherence. Therefore,
this transcript has been lightly edited.

While taking great pains not to alter
meaning in any way, the editor may have
removed false starts, redundancies, and the
“uhs,” “ahs,” and other noises with which
speech is often liberally sprinkled; compressed
some passages which, in unaltered form,
misrepresent the chroniclers meaning; and
relocated some material to place information
in its intended context. Laughter is represented
with [laughter] at the end of a sentence in
which it occurs, and ellipses are used to
indicate that a statement has been interrupted
or is incomplete.. .or that there is a pause for
dramatic effect.

As with all of our oral histories, while
we can vouch for the authenticity of the
interviews in the UNOHP collection, we
advise readers to keep in mind that these are
remembered pasts, and we do not claim that
the recollections are entirely free of error.
We can state, however, that the transcripts
accurately reflect the oral history recordings
on which they were based. Accordingly, each
transcript should be approached with the

Barbara Bennett

same prudence that the intelligent reader
exercises when consulting government
records, newspaper accounts, diaries, and
other sources of historical information.
All statements made here constitute the
remembrance or opinions of the individuals
who were interviewed, and not the opinions
of the UNOHP.

In order to standardize the design of all
UNOHP transcripts for the online database,
most have been reformatted, a process that
was completed in 2012. This document may
therefore differ in appearance and pagination
from earlier printed versions. Rather than
compile entirely new indexes for each volume,
the UNOHP has made each transcript fully
searchable electronically. If a previous version
of this volume existed, its original index has
been appended to this document for reference
only. A link to the entire catalog can be found
online at http://oralhistory.unr.edu/.

For more information on the UNOHP
or any of its publications, please contact the
University of Nevada Oral History Program at
Mail Stop 0324, University of Nevada, Reno,
NV, 89557-0324 or by calling 775/784-6932.

Alicia Barber
Director, UNOHP
July 2012

Original Preface

Since 1965 the University of Nevada Oral
History Program (UNOHP) has produced
over 200 works similar to the one at hand.
Following the precedent established by Allan
Nevins at Columbia University in 1948 (and
perpetuated since by academic programs
such as ours throughout the English-speaking
world) these manuscripts are called oral
histories. Unfortunately, some confusion
surrounds the meaning of the term. To the
extent that these ‘oral’ histories can be read,
they are not oral, and while they are useful
historical sources, they are not themselves
history. Still, custom is a powerful force;
historical and cultural records that originate
in tape-recorded interviews are almost
uniformly labeled ‘oral histories’, and our
program follows that usage.

Among oral history programs, differences
abound in the way information is collected,
processed and presented. At one end of
a spectrum are some that claim to find
scholarly value in interviews which more
closely resemble spontaneous encounters
than they do organized efforts to collect

information. For those programs, any
preparation is too much. The interviewer
operates the recording equipment and serves
as the immediate audience, but does not
actively participate beyond encouraging the
chronicler to keep talking. Serendipity is the
principal determinant of the historical worth
of information thus collected.

The University of Nevada’s program
strives to be considerably more rigorous in
selecting chroniclers, and in preparing for
and focusing interviews. When done by the
UNOHP, these firsthand accounts are meant
to serve the function of primary source
documents, as valuable in the process of
historiography as the written records with
which historians customarily work. However,
while the properly conducted oral history is
a reliable source, verifying the accuracy of
all of the statements made in the course of
an interview would require more time and
money than the UNOHP’s operating budget
permits. The program can vouch that the
statements were made, and that the chronicler
has approved the edited manuscript, but it

Barbara Bennett

xii

does not assert that all are entirely free of
error. Accordingly, our oral histories should
be approached with the same caution that
the prudent reader exercises when consulting
government records, newspaper accounts,
diaries and other sources of historical
information.

Each finished manuscript is the product
of a collaboration—its structure influenced
by the directed questioning of an informed,
well-prepared interviewer, and its articulation
refined through editing. While the words in
this published oral history are essentially
those of Mrs. Bennett, the text is not a
verbatim transcription of the interview as it
occurred. In producing a manuscript, it is
the practice of the UNOHP to employ the
language of the chronicler, but to edit for
clarity and readability. By shifting text when
necessary, by polishing syntax, and by deleting
or subsuming the questions of the interviewer,
a first-person narrative with chronological
and topical order is created. Mrs. Bennett has
reviewed the finished manuscript of her oral
history and affirmed in writing that it is an
accurate representation of her statements.

The UNOHP realizes that there will be
some researchers who prefer to take their
oral history straight, without the editing that
was necessary to produce this text; they are
directed to the tape recording. Copies of all
or part of this work and the tapes from which
it is derived are available from:

The University of Nevada
Oral History Program
Mailstop 0324
University of Nevada-Reno
89557

Introduction

“A sufficient measure of civilization is
the influence of good women,” wrote Ralph
Waldo Emerson in Society and Solitude.
If Nevada’s civilization is measured by the
influence Barbara Bennett has had, it will
not come up wanting. However, but for the
University of Nevada’s Oral History Program,
Nevadans would have no way of knowing of
this remarkable woman who has touched the
lives of so many people in our state.

This oral history of Barbara Bennett
begins with a heartbreaking description of her
early years in Oakland, California, and is truly
a testament to the fact that despite poverty,
ill-treatment and neglect, one can survive
and become more resilient, independent and
strong. She describes leaving home at the age
of 13 and actually becoming self-supporting.
She worked for caring people who insisted
that she complete her education. For the first
time in her life, she was able to socialize with
her peers in school and participate in extra¬
curricular activities.

Unfortunately, college plans didn’t work
out because of World War II, and Barbara

went to work in Bay Area defense plants.
When the war ended she lost her job and her
independence, like so many other women, to
returning servicemen. She realized that it was
a “man’s world” at that time. Barbara married
John Bennett, a returning serviceman, and
continued to live in Oakland. She and John
started their family—two daughters and a
son—and both held jobs in order to participate
in the American Dream. Their family was first
and foremost in her life, and no decisions
affecting the family were made unilaterally.

In 1964 the Bennetts moved to Reno,
and Barbara went to work for the telephone
company. While she scored well on company
examinations, she was unsuccessful in getting
promotions, and this experience, among
others, led her to become interested in issues
and causes. This was the period of time
when affirmative action for minorities was
beginning, but before people over 40 had
started organizing over age-related injustices
in the workplace.

In 1970, armed with statistics proving
discrimination, Barbara again applied for a

XIV

Barbara Bennett

promotion, but to no avail. While she had what
was probably a winning case of discrimination
in court, she couldn’t afford to fight it, and she
eventually left the telephone company She
feels that since then the company has made
strides in improving conditions for women in
her age bracket; her determination and plain
stubbornness helped bring about changes to
benefit other people.

This kind of injustice to herself and to
others eventually led Barbara to become
active in womens issues and ultimately to be
instrumental in forming the Womens Political
Caucus. And, of course, it was at this time
that the Equal Rights Amendment was at the
forefront of womens issues. The goal of the
Womens Political Caucus was to secure good
candidates, both male and female, who grasped
the issues of women in the workplace and
women in their homes. Several persons, both
members and nonmembers of the Caucus, ran
for office and won. Ultimately, through these
efforts, the city of Reno and Washoe County
not only had female members on the various
boards, but eventually had several women city
and county commissioners.

Nevada’s racial minorities are another
group whose lives have been touched because
Barbara couldn’t stand the injustices meted out
to them. She describes her feeling when the
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.
Once more she marched on another cause
and fought racial discrimination in housing,
jobs and wherever it reared its bigoted head.

In the early 1970s, the Bennetts moved
from their house on Keystone Avenue into
a mobile home. They wanted a home they
could afford in retirement. Unfortunately,
mobile home park landlords in Nevada
became greedy, forcing some retirees out of
their mobile homes because of “atrocious”
increases in rates for space. This became
another cause for Barbara; she founded the

Nevada Mobile Homeowners Association,
and through this group righted many of
the wrongs. And here we have yet another
segment of the population whose life was
made better because of Barbara.

By this time, she had attained the name
recognition necessary to run for public office.
Hers was a name not always popular with
special interest groups, but she had a public
profile. It was time to enter formal politics.
She ran for county commissioner in 1975 and
was defeated. In 1977, she ran for Reno City
Council and lost again. But in 1979, she ran
for mayor of Reno and won.

Barbara was a formidable opponent at all
times because she was so well prepared for the
task at hand. She was honest and the people
knew it; even her opponents acknowledged
that she had no price tag. She opposed the
enormous campaign contributions provided
by special interest groups, and accepted none.
She was truly “of the people.”

In this oral memoir, Barbara Bennett
provides, in great detail, a history of the
problems Washoe County and Reno faced
in the 1970s and early 1980s, and of the
problems they still face. She is exceptionally
candid in her descriptions of the people she
encountered along the way and the people she
worked with as an elected official.

Barbara has long been affiliated with
Common Cause, both locally and nationally,
and has brought a lot of pride to members of
the organization. (She has received formal
recognition of her good work at both the local
and national level.) However, Barbara recently
lost her husband, John, and now has a less-
than-active profile in the community. While
she has certainly given more than her fair
share, many people are urging her to become
active again and run for political office.

The last page of this oral history carries
the advice that John and Barbara gave their

Introduction

children: “Your family is everything. You’ve
got brothers and sisters in school. Look after
them, because you’re going to have your
family your whole life. It’s the only thing in
your life that is going to be constant if you
will let it be.” That was and is the credo of the
Bennett family. In his 1820 sketch, “The Wife,”
Washington Irving wrote: “There is in every
true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire,
which lies dormant in the broad daylight of
prosperity but which kindles up and beams
and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.” Mr.
Irving must have known someone very much
like Barbara when he was inspired to write
those words.

Leola H. Armstrong
Common Cause
March, 1989

Barbara Bennett pictured in 1982 with Common Cause
chairman Archibald Cox upon the occasion of receiving the
Common Cause Public Service Achievement Award.
Courtesy of Barbara Bennett Collection.

Formative Years

I was born in Oakland Califnornia, on
July 25, 1923. On my paternal side of the
family, the family name was Peters. Peters
is not a Portuguese name, but they were
Portuguese in descent. Apparently, the family
name was changed, and I didn’t learn that
until many years later.

I do not know to this day what it was,
and I haven’t really had enough interest to
follow up and find out. I don’t know where
my grandfather was born precisely—it
could’ve been the Azores, or it could’ve been
Portugal—but as a young man, be came to
this country from the Azores and settled
in Oakland. He was ultimately killed in an
accident while working for the railroad. I
was quite young at that time, so I remember
very little about him, outside of his shocking
white hair. I do not remember my paternal
grandmother at all. I don’t know whether she
came from the same part of the world as he,
or whether he met her in Oakland.

My maternal grandparents were both
Irish. My grandfather’s name was Heffron.

They came from Missouri, settled in California
around what we now know as the Petaluma
area, and did some farming. Ultimately they
left some land to a school which I don’t believe
operates any longer, but the land is now part
of the public domain. I don’t think they were
well-to-do then. Even if you gave a couple of
acres of land for a public cause, you didn’t have
to be wealthy to do so. In the 1940s and 1950s
you could still buy land in the Sacramento
area, the Bay Area, and throughout California
for $10, $20 an acre. So their donation was not
one given through wealth. Outside of wanting
to provide a public service, I don’t understand
why they gave the land.

Both my parents were born in Oakland,
I think...my father in 1898: I’m not sure how
my mother’s family got from the Petaluma
area over to Oakland. The details about my
family are very sketchy, because I’m from a
broken home. My mother was quite young
when she married—she was 18. My father, I
would guess, was six or seven years older at
the time, but I’m not sure. My mother and

Barbara Bennett

father were divorced when I was three years
old, so when I was a young child I didn’t have
that sense of family that a lot of people have.
A lot of pieces have been put together in my
head—some comes from talking to an aunt
or other people in the past. But the facts are
not as coherent or flowing as I would like
them to be.

During the Depression era, my father
was a laundry truck driver. I suppose that
was nothing to sneeze at in those days,
because there were many people who had
no employment at all. My mother was a
homemaker. I was the second born. After I
was born, my sister, Norma, was born in 1925.
She still lives in San Francisco. We’re very
cose, being the only siblings remaining in the
family. My parents had a son who was born
before me, who died of pneumonia at nine
months of age. From what I’ve been able to put
together from my mother’s sisters, my mother
never adapted to the loss and apparently
began to drink very heavily at that time. That
is what ultimately brought about the divorce
in the family. She never did recover, either,
and she died very young in the county hospital
in Alameda from the results of alcoholism.

Surprisingly, I’ve been told that people
don’t remember what happened to them when
they were that young, but perhaps because
things were rather traumatic, I do remember.
I remember the divorce, and I remember that
because my mother was drinking heavily, my
father moved my sister and me all the way
back to Buffalo, New York, for a period of
time. I assume that either he did not want her
to see us, or he was afraid she would come and
take us, because he had been given custody of
us in the divorce suit.

I don’t remember who we stayed with
in Buffalo, but it’s strange because I can still
picture the house. I assume that it was perhaps
a distant relative or someone on my father’s

side, but I really do not know. I can remember
the house very well, because I’d never been in
snow. It was so cold! [laughs]

I’ll never forget that we slept in a loft with
other children, and I contracted scarlet fever.
This was in the days prior to antibiotics, which
makes it a very simple matter now. But it really
could be a very fatal disease back at that time.
As a matter of fact, I apparently had a very bad
case of it, and one of the results of scarlet fever
in those days was the loss of hair. Some people
lost all their hair, which they never regained,
and I was left with a number of scars on my
head where the hair just fell out.

Following that, somehow we came back to
the Bay Area, and my sister and I were placed
in an orphanage. I don’t remember the name,
but it was in Oakland. I think we must have
been there about a year and a half, because I
had not started school yet. I don’t know why
my father didn’t take us back, but he was a
single man at that time...who knows? He
probably had no way of caring for us. I guess
in due time he made arrangements with a
brother and sister-in-law of his in Oakland to
take my sister and me in. We were there about
a year and a half. I think that I was four-and-
a-half years old and I did start school while
we were with this aunt and uncle. They didn’t
have any other children.

I had appendicitis during that time,
[laughs] I remember that I was on my way
home from school and apparently it hit very
sharply and almost burst, and I stopped on
the sidewalk. In those days, neighbors knew
everyone, so they saw me. They went for my
aunt and they took me to the hospital, and
out came the appendix.

I really loved the time with my aunt and
uncle. It was the first sense of family that I
had ever really had. It’s the first Christmas
that I remember clearly, because I spent it
in the hospital, [laughs] It was beautiful.. I

Formative Years

remember laughing about it because things
were so silly. I guess I had a sense of adventure
even then. There was a young girl about my
age in the bed next to me who had been badly
burned in an accident, and her legs were up
to keep from touching, I guess. She dared me
to get up and run to the end of the room. I
suppose I couldn’t resist a challenge even then,
so I did it, and it was just great fun. [laughs]
On Christmas Eve, all the nurses went
through the halls. All the lights were turned
out and they carried candles and they sang
all through the halls. We had our own tree
in the room and it was my first memorable
Christmas. I was six then.

I was with my uncle and aunt from when
I was four-and-a-half until I was seven. My
Uncle Jack started me reading even before I
had started school, and kept after me until I
actually read him the Sunday morning comic
strips. I had a good start in school, and it was
good because I missed a lot of it at an earlier
time. I always liked school—loved it from
day one.

At seven years of age all of us at home—
my sister, aunt, uncle and I—had all been
expecting my father to marry a woman that
we knew he’d seen for quite a period of time.
All of a sudden, he surprised everyone and
up and married a woman that no one had
ever heard of. So there was another whole
family thing there, [laughs] It came as a
shock to everyone. I can’t recall my thought
processes at the time, but I would assume that
because we all liked the other woman so well,
that our future stepmother had this sort of
unfavorable ranking in my opinion right from
the beginning. At any rate, they were married
when I was seven years of age. She had her
own home in Oakland; she was divorced and
Italian, but she was not active in the Catholic
church. So then we went back and lived with
my father and his new wife.

In rationalizing this as time passed
and I got older, I think that I’d reached
the conclusion that at that time my father
just wanted a home for us. Maybe he felt
this woman owning her own home would
provide a home for us, and perhaps this other
woman in his life could not offer this. But it
was disastrous from the beginning. She had
two sons who were considerably older than
us. The youngest was about four years my
senior, and the older was probably ten years
my senior.

At that point in time, my father drifted
somewhat away from the church, in spite of
my having been baptized a Catholic. Perhaps
this was because there was the divorce and
things, I don’t know. He became very active
in the Masonic Order. He was still driving the
laundry truck then. But it seemed like countless
hours committed to the Masonic Order.

Our father spent very little time at home,
and we were left with a stepmother who had
become progressively more vicious. Norma
and I both put up with being called stupid. My
stepmother also used to beat us. The washers
of those days were in the basement, and they
had the hand-wringers on them. You lifted
clothes out by hand and put them through
these wringers. The water was real hot, so
there was a very bard oak stick with about a
two-inch circumference that was used to lift
out the clothing. That stick seemed to be her
favorite weapon.

It sounds so strange, because this kind
of thing was not discussed back then. But
now, because there is so much abuse going
on out there, people are talking about it, and
I feel free to talk about it. We were abused
physically, but mainly emotionally, which
had different effects on my sister and myself.
Norma took years and years...she never really
got over it until maybe ten years ago, which
is a very long period of time. She had what

Barbara Bennett

they used to call a nervous breakdown. She
went through all of that and really had a
very difficult time. These things affected her
differently than they affected me. They made
me stubborn and hard-headed...they really
did. They toughened me.

We didn’t dare tell my father about our
stepmother abusing us, because we figured
that would make things worse. I had always
been so crazy about my father, but during
this period of time he couldn’t see the things
that were happening, and if he did, he didn’t
seem to care enough to do anything about
it. You couldn’t miss some of the knots and
lumps and things that appeared on us, but
we didn’t dare say anything. I had friends in
school, but I never told anyone about anything
because I was ashamed. You just don’t discuss
these things and you go to extremes to hide
bruises...it’s so weird.

As far as my aunt and uncle were
concerned, when my father married this
woman, all ties with both my maternal and
paternal families were cut. I don’t know the
reason why—I don’t know whether my father
cut it off or whether his wife made it obvious
that they were unwelcome. I know that as
time went on, it was very obvious that they
were entirely unwelcome. So all connections
with aunts and uncles on both sides of the
family—cousins, grandparents, everyone—
were just severed. No one really knew what
was going on. In later years I talked with my
grandmother and an aunt that had tried to
come to the house and visit. They said that
every time they called or tried to see us,
we were never told. We just felt we’d been
deserted, and then found out later that that
wasn’t true. We were also told that they had
brought Christmas gifts, which we never saw,
so we don’t know what happened to them.

I became more and more attached to
school because it was almost an escape for me

at that point in time. I’d always loved athletics,
and fortunately had a very natural flair for it,
too. I wanted very much to take part in a lot
of these activities at school, but we absolutely
could not. Our stepmother wouldn’t let us,
and that showed just how petty things can
be. There were always field trips in school,
and students would go to the local dairies and
bakeries, and that sort of thing. Whenever one
of those field trips was due, we had to get a
note from our parents approving them, and
I never got one approved. She refused it, and
my father never even knew about it. I don’t
know why she wouldn’t let us go. We were
also not entitled to have any friends to the
home..I never had a friend in the house. We
were never allowed to go to a party and never
allowed to stay for after-school activities. It
was just awful..

I don’t know if my father and his wife
got along, because I hardly remember him
ever being at home—he was just gone all the
time. My sister and I were very, very close,
because we only had each other. People talk
about the old, mean stepmother. I mean she
was an absolute bitch! She really was. But we
were instructed to call her Mother. We were
told that that was what she was to be called.

Our clothes were hand-me-downs, which
was not unusual for any family, because
this was during the Depression. I know my
husband has said how he was embarrassed
to wear hand-me-down clothing, but I didn’t
know anything else...what difference did it
make? It was something to wear, [laughs]

Once in junior high school some of the
girls in the class were having a party—I think
it was a birthday party—and I really wanted
to go. I hadn’t been allowed to do that sort of
thing. I asked if I could go, and the answer
was no, but fate intervened. Right next door
to where we lived, a sister of my stepmother
lived. I got along with her very well—they

Formative Years

raised chow dogs. As often happened, I would
go over to this womans house and sit with
their dogs if they were going away, because
the dogs required special feedings. It worked
out because I had to go take care of the dogs
on the same night the party was being held.
Well, I sneaked out and off I went to the party,
[laughs] My sister was with me and she went,
too. During the party there was a spelling
contest, which I won, and I got a quarter. It
was a lot of money when you never had an
allowance...it was a ton of money.

When we went to go home, we rounded
a corner about two blocks from the house
and we could see flashing lights. They had
discovered, obviously, that we were missing
and had called the police. My sister decided to
go on and go home, and I told her to do what
she wanted, but I decided this was a good time
for me to leave, [laughs] Norma went straight
up that street. I went around the block in the
back, over a fence and down in the basement,
and got a jacket and a change of clothes, and
off I went.

I went no place in particular. Here I had
this quarter in my pocket, and I was absolutely
rich, [laughs] It was about 9:00 at night by
then. I took a dime, I think, and went to a
movie. I walked about two miles to town to
a movie and stayed until the theater closed.
Then I left and I didn’t know what I was going
to do. My father had a brother that lived sort
of halfway between where we lived and where
downtown was. (He wasn’t the same uncle we
had lived with.) I started to go to their place,
but I knew if I went there they would call my
father, and I would have to go home. So I
changed my mind when I just about got there
and I just wandered around the neighborhood
for some place to lie down. I found a place in
someone’s backyard on one of those swings
that go back and forth. I just crawled on the
swing and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and
took off again. There is a famous large park,
Lake Merritt, in Oakland. The weather was
warm, and I went over to the park and I just
spent the day gallivanting. I was really getting
hungry by this time. Some of the picnics and
things began to break up, and when I saw
people throw something away, I went and got
it. That’s how I ate.

That day I took another of my dimes and
went back and spent the day in the show again.
By then I was really getting hungry.... At any
rate I managed to get enough in me to survive.
I was down to a nickel and bought two candy
bars with that. But by the end of that day things
were looking pretty bleak. I was afraid to go
back and sleep in the same place again, so I
went to the police station, walked in and told
a policeman who I was. The policeman said,
“Yes,” as though he were saying, “So?...” I told
him I had run away, and I was so hungry.

It was real adult jail, and so they took me
into this cell and locked me up. They were
very nice. Anyway, they brought me in a cup
of coffee and the hardest danish that you’d
ever eaten in your life. But I must have just
absolutely wolfed it down. When my father
and stepmother came to get me, she said she
knew I’d been staying with someone, but the
policeman said, “She was very hungry when
she got here, so we don’t think that she’s been
with anyone.”

We left, and it was back home again to
some of the same things. But I had developed
a certain amount of independence during this
journey, and I knew that I was not going to
be staying there very long. In fact, I left there
for good when I was 13 years of age. When I
ran away, I know it scared Norma, but I really
couldn’t stay...I really just couldn’t tolerate it.
I was the only one that was really taking the
physical beatings at that point in time, but I
wouldn’t cry.

Barbara Bennett

What I did when I left home at 13 was to go
to the newspaper ads and find a job, so I wasn’t
just running foolishly by then. I knew that if
I was going to stay gone that I had to have
a way to survive. In the newspaper I found
an opening where they wanted someone to
look after children, clean house, and live in.
It suited me absolutely perfectly...$8 a month
and room and board. I didn’t tell my father
and stepmother—I just left. I told the people
that were hiring me why I wanted the job and
said I absolutely would not go home. I had
them contact my father, and he came over and
agreed to let me stay. He knew by then that I
was very serious. I stayed there and went to
school a couple of years, worked for them, and
took care of the children. The family had two
children, and the father was in the insurance
business. The wife was very active in civic
affairs. They really took an interest in me.
Here I was on my own... lots of weird things
could have happened.

I had my days off and I spent them
with the two girls that I was friends with in
school. I spent a lot of time with the family
of a friend who died recently. Her name
was Margaret. Margaret didn’t have a father.
There was a mother, a grandmother and an
aunt all living in the same house with her,
and they sort of took me in. I was either at
their home, or back where I lived with the
family whose children I watched. This was
clear on the other end of town from where
my father lived.

I don’t know how many miles I walked... it
had to be at least three or four miles to high
school because I could only afford a ticket for
bus fare one way. So I was up very early in the
morning and walked to school. They made
sure that I went to school, and they saw my
report cards and signed them and followed up
on things. They exerted some discipline when
it was necessary, and some reasoning—a great

deal of that. They were very influential in my
life at that time.

By then I was in Technical High in
Oakland, and I had never told the teachers
about my situation. But I think my friend,
Margaret, had told them of my situation—
how I got in it. Then they began to take an
interest in me. When I was about eight or
nine years old, my front tooth had broken off,
and it was a permanent tooth. By the time I
was in high school, it had turned black, and
it made me very self-conscious. I was always
smiling in a rather strange way, and this gym
teacher took an interest in me and sent me to
her dentist to have it fixed. She strongly urged
me to keep up my grades and go to college. I
really wanted to do just that.

When I was 17,1 took another job working
for a different family in Oakland. The father
was a doctor. Usually no one hired kids until
they were 18—I suppose it was a hangover
from the Depression. I stayed with them until
I was all through high school.

After I had left home and was on my
own, I was able to stay and take part in a lot
of after-school activities. I was a cheerleader
for the Girls’ Athletic Association for some
time, and in my final year I was president of
that group. We had a large “conference” of
all the Girls’ Athletic Association’s schools in
the Oakland area, and that was my first real
experience before a large group. We just had
a wonderful time. I was active in just about
all kinds of sports.

Because I had wanted to go to college,
obviously I had to take what were then called
college-prep courses, so I took all the required
subjects in science, language, math, and
English. I was a good student, but nothing
outstanding. But the freedom that I was
enjoying at that point in time didn’t permit
me to put all the time in studying that I should
have, [laughs] I was enjoying this freedom for

Formative Years

the first time in my life. Free time was not a
problem, even though I was working for that
family. I looked after the children, cleaned,
and did laundry. I didn’t do all these things
alone—the wife in the family was a part of
this, too. In a way I was like a big sister to
the children. I took a shine to cooking early
on...I’ve always loved to cook.

I had really wanted to go to Cal [University
of California-Berkeley], but I knew it was out
of the question from the standpoint of cost.
So I planned to go to San Francisco State. The
teacher who befriended me in high school
graduated there. She was something of a
heroine to me. I thought it was a pretty good
idea, so I moved over to San Francisco and I
applied for work at the telephone company.
They wouldn’t hire me until I turned 18, but
I took the tests and everything.

I was still only making about $30 a month
working for a doctor’s family, and I never felt
any sense of closeness with them, so I kept
looking for another job. I found one working
for the Jantzen bathing suit company in San
Francisco in the stockroom. I stayed there
until I was 18, then I went to the telephone
company and went to work for them.

Due to the influence of this very
marvelous woman who was the teacher I
mentioned, I thought I’d like to be a teacher. I
thought I wanted to teach physical education,
mainly. Back then you didn’t have to have
two majors—you could be just a physical
education teacher. The other thing I had been
active in was public speaking classes. That
teacher urged me to go into law, which was
sort of in the back of my head, but I knew it
wasn’t possible. I was going to be lucky if I
made it to college.

I had planned to go to college, but then the
war broke out in December of 1941, the year I
graduated from high school, and that changed
everything. There was never any question in

the minds of all of us at that time: everyone
wanted to do their part in the war effort. The
men were all being taken, and there were
a lot of things where women were needed
to do men’s jobs. I could not see sitting at a
switchboard when there were other women
who could do that, so I went to work in what
we now call the defense industry.

I had worked at the telephone company
for a few months, until the war broke out. I
spent the rest of the war working in defense
plants. I worked for the navy for a while,
out at Hunter’s Point, and then back at the
shipyards in Oakland. I did what we used to
call bucking rivets—like Rosie the Riveter. We
would buck rivets, and we ultimately did some
warehousing at the shipyard. I was active and
very strong. They had a lot of women doing
the heavy lifting and the driving of trucks, so
I did a lot of different things at that time. I was
making good money and I enjoyed it! I was
living by myself then in Oakland.

During this time, Norma stayed at home
with my father and stepmother. Apparently,
after I left, my father began to put two-and-
two together, so Norma has often told me that
she didn’t have as much trouble. She thought
that that was the reason for it. She stayed at
home until she was about 16,1 think. Norma
was not one to just take off and go, but she did
run away. When they took her back, she told
them that she didn’t want to stay there, so they
placed her in a foster home in Alameda. She
stayed there until she got out of high school
and married. We were seeing each other quite
a bit by then. As a matter of fact, when she
turned 18, she too moved to San Francisco
so we’d be closer together.

Marriage, Family, and Employment

After I finished working in the war
industry when the war ended, I met John
Bennett. I met him in Oakland through
some mutual friends. He was my first serious
male interest. John was born in Canada, but
moved to Oakland when he was six years of
age. His family was far more normal than
mine. He had two sisters and two brothers.
His mother and father were divorced, and the
father raised the children in that family. That
was really in the midst of the Depression, and
trying to raise five kids.... I was very close to
John’s father, and still am close to his family.
I had no “mother-in-law problem.” [laughs]
Shed have to be awful bad, because I love my
brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law—they’re
all neat people. We used to have a great time.

John had been in the navy all during the
war, but he was out of the service when I met
him. He had been able to send some money
home to help. He was working in Oakland
and worked at a number of different things.
He did some selling for a tire company for a
while—it was really hard work.

John had been active in a union, and he
had an uncle that was very active in the union
at that time, so John has always had a special
place in his heart for unions. I have, too, for
that matter. I recognize that there is good and
evil in them today, but I think it’s important
for people to understand that they would not
be earning the wages, have the job and safety
protections, or be living in the homes and
driving the cars if unions had not brought
about decent working conditions and wages.
I think that the working men and women of
this country had ought to always be grateful
for that.

I didn’t belong to a union when I was
working in the war industry because I think
they waived a lot of the requirements back
then—they knew that it was temporary. As
a mailer of fact, most of the men that went
into the service maintained their union dues.
I don’t know whether they paid them or
whether they were just carried on the books
or what. But of course when the war ended,
there was no longer any place for women like

Barbara Bennett

myself who had done a lot of the men’s work.
This was traumatic in a lot of ways, because
a lot of women had come to depend on the
money they had been earning to provide
some independence in their life. Then they
found that the jobs had to be turned back to
the servicemen who were returning. We all
understood that, but felt that there should be
room for all of us, and there wasn’t. Ultimately,
that’s one of the things that led me to be active
in forming the Women’s Political Caucus. It
also fueled my being active in attempts to
ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I felt that
women ought to be the masters of their own
destiny—we should not have the government
and business telling us that we cannot do
those kinds of things because we’re women,
especially since we’ve proven we can do them.

After the war John and I married, and then
I didn’t work. When we were first married, we
lived in Oakland. We started a family, and we
ultimately had three children—two daughters
and a son. I did go back to work in time. I
guess I was a real pushy broad, [laughs]

I think that having grown up in poverty
and during the Depression, there were a lot
of things that I wanted in life. I didn’t want to
be working for someone else, and I had all of
these ambitions. I wanted everything that life
could offer. I’d worked for people that had the
Cadillacs in the garages, and their swimming
pools, and their beautiful homes...what we call
the “American Dream.” It was what I wanted,
so I was willing to work. John was always
very good in that respect, too. We worked to
get there.

Because my childhood was so unnatural,
I had special feelings about having a family
and being a mother. I guess that I was perhaps
too easy a parent I guess even my kids thought
that I could’ve been a more firm parent. They
got away with a lot of things that they felt they
shouldn’t have. I never physically punished

the children— never. I would not lay a hand on
them, and I was very adamant about that. I just
didn’t think that was a way to bring them up.
I really did enjoy the children, but there were
things that were missing, too. Never having
had this home life as a child, you’re not sure
what to do with children and how to take care
of them. But when you live in a neighborhood,
neighbors learn from one another. There was
a woman next door who had three children
at the time, and another across the street who
had two older children. So there was someone
that you could go to for advice and learn what
you’re supposed to be and do as a mother. I’m
still very close to my children.

We weren’t well off when we were first
married. It was a matter of two people working
hard to get the things that we wanted. I didn’t
go back to work until right after Linda was
born. She’s the youngest. I went to work for
the government at that time. The job wasn’t
anything that I wanted to stay with, and John
in the meanwhile had advanced. He went
to work for the government and became an
electronics equipment inspector. There was
some advantage to working for the government
in those days for servicemen, because they got
to keep some of the seniority, and he advanced
nicely. Ultimately John decided that he just
didn’t want to work for the government, so
he quit—not just like that, though, because
he had a family. We talked about it for some
period of time. We decided it was time to make
some changes, and we came to Reno. John had
a brother in Reno who was in the plumbing
business, and he had offered John a job as an
expediter. That’s how we came to Reno. I wasn’t
employed, so I didn’t leave behind a job, but I
did seek employment went I got to Reno. That
was in 1964. We bought a home on Keystone
Avenue on the fourteen hundred block, as I
recall. The kids were in high school at that
time, so they went to Reno High.

Marriage, Family, and Employment

I think we had been to Reno twice in the
past. Most everyone in California comes up
just to have some fun. We didn’t really know
anything about Reno, and the change was
difficult for us. That was because our children
had to change schools. If you take children
out of school at that age, it’s a tough move
for them...it was traumatic. We both left our
families, with the exception of John’s brother,
Tom, and his wife, who lived in Reno. So it
was a difficult move. I didn’t fall in love with
Reno overnight for those reasons, but it didn’t
take me long to learn.

I liked Reno because it was a small-town
atmosphere, and it was easy to get acquainted
with others. It was easy for the kids to make
friends, once they made up their minds that
they would. I think that those were some of
the bonuses of moving.

I went to work for the telephone company
in Reno in 1964. In 1965 I had a heart attack,
which resolved any lingering ambitions that
I had as far as “ladder-climbing.” You really
stop and take a look and decide where you
want to go, what you want to do, whether your
values are as they should be.... I did a lot of
that at that time.

We’d been through a lot of stress, and
I’d always been a smoker, so I’m sure that
that was a part of it. I had the heart attack
at home. I’d gone into the hospital because
our older daughter, Sherry, then was out of
high school—she’d gone to work for Washoe
Medical Center as an EEC technician. My
knee popped up—really swelled—one day,
and she said I should see a doctor. I just felt
kind of icky and really lousy. But I’d gone
on to work and then got to feeling worse
and worse on this particular Thursday.
So Sherry talked me into checking into
the hospital. The doctors checked me out
through Thursday and Friday, did EKGs, and
couldn’t find anything wrong. I’ve learned

since that time that an EKG doesn’t show
much of anything.

They released me on Saturday, and Sunday
morning I had a myocardial infarction. I had
a bad one, a very strong heart attack. I knew
I was having a heart attack. The pain was
oppressive, like a boulder on my chest. My
arm felt like it had been clamped off—it was
like someone was just pulling. I had walked
down to the Eagle Thrifty store on Keystone
and West Seventh to pick up the Sunday
paper. Sherry showed up later because I hadn’t
come back. I guess when I didn’t come back
right away, she went down and found me. I
just sat there, she ran back and got John and
called the doctor. I described my symptoms
to her and she relayed them very accurately to
the doctor. He did not believe it was anything
serious, ordered a pain medication sent to the
house, and said I should come into the office
in the morning.

At that time, I guess Reno was still so small
that we didn’t have a cardiologist—internists
took care of those things. I’ve never gotten
over this, because it made me more and more
furious with the way women were treated. The
doctor who had had me in the hospital prior
to the heart attack said, “Oh, well.”

When they released me from the hospital,
they told me at that time, “Women your age
do not have heart attacks.” He told me that
and I believed it! The next morning we went
to the office and they hooked me up to the
EKG. I could see it running off the machine,
and whereas there are normally sharp points
on an EKG pattern, this was sort of like
low-sloping mountains with rolling lines
on it—no sharp points. The nurse who was
doing the testing on me shut the machine
off immediately and went running for the
doctor. And, of course, he sent me over to
the hospital then in a wheelchair. I have to
believe that he was wondering whether they

Barbara Bennett

were going to get sued. I never thought of it
at the time. I’ve never sued anyone in my life,
but that was a very life-threatening situation
and was an extremely poor decision that the
doctor had made.

I spent about three weeks in the hospital;
they didn’t have the equipment or technology
that they do today. It’s surprising how much
progress has been made in the last 22 or 23
years. But in 1965 they didn’t even have really
good monitoring machines in the hospitals.
At any rate, I spent three weeks in the hospital
and another three months recovering at home
before they let me go back to work, which they
don’t do any longer. I think they feel you’re
better off moving around soon and trying to
get back into your normal pattern.

The first time you have problems with a
heart, I think that you change some of your
style of living. I think that a heart attack has a
distinct impact on the value system. It compels
you to get into things that maybe you’ve been
delaying because you thought you were too
busy. You pay more attention to what’s going
on in the world and start getting involved.

Following the heart attack, I really didn’t
do a lot of anything, because I had a recovery
period and we had three teenage kids. Then
when the money got tight, I returned to work
for the telephone company. I had gone to work
for the telephone company before the heart
attack in 1964. Then when I had the heart
attack, I was on disability, some of which was
paid. When that time ran out, my job was
still there for me. I was a good employee. I
was conscientious; things came easily to me;
I learned quickly; and I showed up when I
was supposed to. I think that they’re more
patient with good employees than they are
otherwise—I think any company is.

I went to work at the phone company as
an information operator. If someone called in
and wanted a number, you looked it up. This

was before all of the new changes came in;
it’s now done by computer. I spent five years
as an operator and then transferred over to
what they call the traffic offices, where we
worked budgets and schedules, and where
the insurance and time records were kept. It
was sort of a secretarial-bookkeeping-budget
analysis job. It was interesting work and I
enjoyed it. I also worked as an assistant traffic
operating manager, which is quite a jump
from other clerical work or from being an
operator. I worked in that department as a
substitute for some time. This was about 1970.

I was 40 years old when I went to the
telephone company, and it was unusual for
them to hire someone at that age. Promotions
simply were not going to older women. By that
time I’d been there five years, so I was 45. I
found myself in a position of training much
younger women who would be promoted. You
hear of this often, even today. I took the FAR-
Personnel Advanced Review tests, I believe
it is—and scored extremely well. Still, I was
seeing all these young kids getting promoted.
It began to bother me a lot, because by then
I was also involved in other women’s issues,
though the women’s movement had not really
impacted Reno as it had elsewhere in the
country. I really was very angry.

The minority issue, which I still often think
about, was also coming into play along with the
problems with women’s issues. The telephone
company had developed a policy wherein
they had to advance so many minorities, and
they were good about it. Minorities included
Hispanics, blacks, and Asians. But the one that
really threw me was that it meant Basques.
How it got to that, I don’t know. In fact, I
recently read an interesting story in Time
magazine discussing how they’re bringing all
these different elements of society into the
Affirmative Action programs with very little
proof that they’re minorities.

Marriage, Family, and Employment

Between my age and the policy of
promoting minorities at that time, I was
really kind of locked in at the telephone
company The minority thing didn’t bother
me because as part of the Nevada Women’s
Political Caucus, we were working with
those kinds of things. I was fully aware that
people who have a lot of seniority and a lot
of time in sometimes don’t get promoted. The
purpose for that policy, in my opinion, was
to open doors that had been dosed to those
people for all those years. And the doors had
to open—that’s all there was to it. They still
do, for that matter.

I’d applied for a job in engineering, which
would have been a substantial upgrade, and
lost it to a young Hispanic woman, and I did
not complain about it. However, the company
policy of continuing to promote on the basis
of youth was making me more irate all the
time. I wasn’t sure how far the laws went in
prohibiting discrimination on the basis of age,
but I felt that they went far enough where a
clear pattern could be seen at the telephone
company. I happened to be in a position where
I could accumulate statistics—I knew when
people came to work and I knew their ages,
so it was simply a matter of putting numbers
together. When I did, it was even worse than
I thought it was.

When I still could not advance in the
traffic department, I asked for a transfer
into another department. At that time I was
seriously considering leaving, but I wanted
to get my 10 years in, because they had just
passed a new federal law dealing with vested
pensions after 10 years of service. I figured,
“All right. I’m going to stay until I get my 10
years.” However, it turned out—unbeknownst
to me at the time—that the law only applies
when you contribute to a pension system. At
that time, the telephone company paid the
entire amount of the pension. So I spent a

couple of years more there than I would have
normally, and the promotional policies there
on the basis of age were no better than they’d
been in the traffic department.

I decided to resign, and I wrote a very
scathing letter to the head of the telephone
company in Nevada, pointing out my reasons
for it and citing statistics. By then I had
talked to an attorney who had spent some
time here in Reno and had gone down to San
Francisco to open an affirmative action-equal
opportunity legal office. I contacted her and
sent her the information. As a matter of fact,
I sent her an exact copy of the letter that I’d
sent to management. She felt that I had a
case, but she was so bogged down that she
couldn’t take it. As a mailer of fact, she could
only recommend one attorney at the time
that she felt even had enough background in
it to take it on. But we were not in a position
to hire an attorney.

So I wrote a letter to the phone company
and told them that I had been advised that I
probably had a very strong case, but could not
afford to pursue it. I felt that they ought to look
to their policies and do something about them,
and they have over time. I can’t say that that
was the sole reason, but I do believe that it was
certainly an impetus towards some changes
that took place in the telephone company.

I didn’t exactly get a direct response from
the telephone company when I wrote the
letter. The executive secretary to the head of
the telephone company here in Nevada at that
time also happened to be a personal friend
of mine whom I knew outside the telephone
company. Apparently, the boss found out
about it and sent her to talk to me. Of course, I
pulled no punches again. I said, “You have my
reasons. They’re valid.” My letter was a letter
of resignation, and I left on that note—that
was in 1975.

Becoming a Political Activist

My interest in politics started when I was
in junior high school, because that was at the
time when Franklin Roosevelt ran against
Alf Landau. We conducted our own little
campaigns and cast our “straw votes.” We
campaigned and argued among ourselves, and
made fun of the other persons candidate, as
kids are wont to do. I was always a Democrat.
My father was one, too.

I remember one night John and I went to
dinner with his brother, Tom, and his wife. I
was interested in politics even then, around
1965. I guess Tom’s wife asked me if I knew
who our senators were, I did know some, but
not all of them. So I soon got their names
and began to read local papers. I was not
involved in politics in California—I was too
busy with three children, [laughs] We had
had all of them in a four-year period of time,
so there wasn’t a lot of time for that sort of
thing. But I did follow things. I knew who
the mayors, congressmen, senators, and city
council people were, so I followed the issues.
I was not actively involved, but I was involved

emotionally and kept track of things that were
going on.

I had always been anxious to study law,
but my only opportunity was to take an
extension course. From 1967 to 19711 studied
law through an extension course offered by La
Salle Extension University out of Chicago. It
was a widely accepted, good course, although
home study is not the kind of thing that
prepares you to be a lawyer in a court of law,
in my opinion. You don’t get access to that
kind of training. You’re strictly reading out
of books and taking tests. But it provided a
very substantial background in business and
corporate law. As a matter of fact, I never
thought that I would have an interest in
corporate law, and so when my highest grades
came out of that, I had to tell you I was pretty
disappointed, [laughs] I hoped they would be
in some other area of law, but knowledge of
corporate law is advantageous in dealing with
contracts and business. Later at city hall it was
certainly an advantage in reading contracts

Barbara Bennett

and dealing with ordinances, and it has been
something that has been very useful in my life.

I became interested in many issues when
Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.
I stopped into a small neighborhood grocery
store, and the news of his death hadn’t been
on the air too long. I had stopped to get a
package of gum on my way to work. When
I went to pay for it, there was a customer in
there talking to the man who owned the store.
They were talking about the Martin Luther
King assassination. They said, “It’s about
time somebody got that bastard.” That did it!
I knew if I opened my mouth that I was just
going to be in terrible trouble. So I threw the
gum down on the counter and left. That just
stuck with me.

I contacted Eddie Scott, who ran the Race
Relations Center at that time. I don’t know
where I learned about him, whether I had read
something in the paper or what, but that’s how
I really began to get involved in things in Reno.
I worked with Eddie on housing problems and
in other things. Eddie is quite a character, but
he was committed to the things he believed
in. No one in the black community—like the
women—had ever spoken out about their
concerns and about what was happening to
them in the community. Therefore, I enjoyed
working with Eddie.

One of the major issues I worked on with
the Race Relations Center was fair housing
for blacks. That was a serious issue. I’d go out
and apply for an apartment all by myself and
the landlord would be willing to rent it to me.
Then if a black member of the group were to
go with me, he would be told there was no
vacancy. Or if he went alone, there would be
no vacancy. It’s tragic that you have to stoop
to some so-called underhanded tactics, but
if you want to prove a point, at times it’s
necessary to do that—it really is.

The main problems that we were looking
at as far as discrimination was concerned were
those that dealt with the black population in
the area. If I remember right, there was no
black professor at the university at that time.
There may have been one, but that would still
have been disgraceful, and there were not a
lot of black teachers in the schools.

Through the Race Relations Center I met
other women who were involved: I met Maya
Miller and Nancy Gomes. Those women were
the two major impacts who were also working
with Eddie. Through them we got in one thing
after another. Maya had always been involved
in this sort of thing and so had Nancy. I
suppose you could say they sort of took me
under their wing. When I realized how much
I had been missing, how little I knew about
these kinds of things, and how much I could
learn from people like that, it really took a lot
of my thought processes and kept me busy.
Despite the fact that I was working, we went
on to a lot of things. We started the Nevada
Women’s Political Caucus as a result.

Nancy ran for the school board, and I
worked with that and began to get involved
in some of the other campaigns, like for Mary
Frazzini. I was also a member of the Business
and Professional Women (BPW) at that
time. That was howl met Mary Frazzini and
Marge DeCosta, who later worked with me in
founding the Women’s Political Caucus along
with Maya and Nancy. The BPW had access
to names of other clubs throughout the state,
so I got in and sent letters out to those people,
letting them know that we were here. We
were not successful in getting clubs outside
of Reno or our immediate area, because I was
working full-time. Just getting Reno going was
a substantial challenge at that time.

I don’t belong to the BFW now, and
perhaps some of their aims have changed. They
probably set out to be a social organization

Becoming a Political Activist

to bring working and professional women
together to learn from one another, but early
on they also began to address some of the
issues involving working women. I shall not
forget one night when the BPW honored me
as one of the women of the year. The speaker
was Betty Stoddard, who now does ads for
Carpeteria in Reno. Anyway, here she was
in front of this group of informed, caring
women, and she told them that a woman
should never be president because during
“that time of the month,” they were just too
unpredictable, [laughs]

We really developed a tremendous initial
northern Nevada Women’s Political Caucus.
Mary Frazzini was a Republican, so it was a
bipartisan kind of thing. We worked hard to
keep it that, and we did have a substantial
number. Sue Wagner, who is also a Republican,
came in in time. Our main thrust at that time
was to get some parity in elective offices in this
state. Up until then, we’d never had a woman
on the Reno City Council; never had one on
the County Commission; never had one in
Spark. And only about five percent of the
legislature were female. Most of those women,
I’m sorry to say, were the kinds of women who
were uncomfortable with a women’s political
movement—like Helen Hen. They fit into this
male-dominated society because they didn’t
rock any boats.

Our first major chore-outside of
organizing, getting members, getting the
word out in the community, doing newspaper
pieces and stories on the radio when the
opportunity presented itself—was we wanted
to establish a City of Reno Commission on the
Status of Women. Sam Dibitonto was mayor
at that time. I went to Sam and he was only
too happy to start it. He has two daughters
and a wife. He said he was surrounded by
women, and he would be happy to get us a

women’s political caucus. And we did. So we
had the Reno Commission on the Status of
Women going, which began to get into issues
in Reno. Then there was also the Caucus,
which attempted to encourage, find, and
train women to run for office and work for
the Equal Rights Amendment.

One of the other things that we dealt with
at that time was our attempt to attract men
who were of a like mind into the Women’s
Political Caucus. We did have a fair number
of those. I know that Dennis Myers was an
early member, as was Ken Hailer. I think Jim
Kosinski was an early member; there were
some others, too. We also began to get into
the university and attracted some university
women. The university women at that time
were talking about the fact that athletics for
women certainly were not only under-funded,
but they simply weren’t funded at all.

We really had our hands full with training
people to work in political races. We trained
people to do that so that they could get out
and be active. From that effort came hundreds
of women who worked for both men and
women candidates.

At that time, there was an antagonism
towards women’s groups of this kind, and
Reno certainly was guilty of a bit of that.
Here I’d been married for about 30 years at
the time, and Sue was married, and Nancy
was married. We also had women who were
divorced, those that had never been married,
and some that were too young to even be
considering it. I felt it was very important to
push aside this bra-burning image—it was
so phony to begin with—but once that sort
of thing hits the media, it just grows into a
huge fireball. Unfortunately, I thought that,
in a sense, we had to demean ourselves a bit
in order to say, “Look, here’s a picture of me.
I’m shopping in a grocery store, I’ve got kids,
and I’m married.” I shouldn’t have to explain

Barbara Bennett

those things, but it seemed very important
to the future of the Caucus at that time. I was
willing to do it and the members were willing
to have it done.

The issue of lesbianism came up very early
in the 1970s. I know I had a lot of people
disagree with me, but I think this issue became
a big problem. I went to the first women’s
political convention in Houston in 1977, I
think. We had groups breaking any from
the core of the National Women’s Political
Caucus, setting up lesbian caucuses, which
was certainly their privilege. No one cared
about their sexual orientation—which I didn’t
then and still don’t—but I’m still convinced
that it really slowed down the women’s
movement. In order to make progress we
had to deal with it face on—not by telling
them, “You can’t do this,’—but by refusing to
let them control either the national caucus
or local ones. They were always welcome
members and their concerns were addressed,
but the majority of us felt that they should not
be permitted to take over.

I’ve never been a member of the League
of Women Voters. The intent of the League
has never been to search out candidates, raise
monies for them, or help them get elected.
They were into other areas, presenting issues
on both sides, and that was the difference
between the Caucus and the League of
Women Voters. The Caucus sought to take
stands and tried to help the candidates
who understood the problems that we were
attempting to address. We also worked on
legislation, changing Nevada laws that were
discriminatory. The League never got into
that. We had many things in common with
the BPW and the League of Women Voters,
as well as other organizations. But I think that
at that time, our role was specific enough so
that we attracted women not only from those

groups, but also others from outside those
areas, too.

One Nevada law that was on the books
back then was the fact that a woman could
not go into business without her husband’s
signature. It didn’t matter if she was the sole
support of the family or if he was an invalid.
It didn’t matter what the circumstances were,
which was so ridiculous. It was crazy—
absolutely insane. When we first started
fighting this law, we hadn’t run into the Janine
Hansens of the world. When she believed
in something, she was—and probably still
is—one of the most articulate, well-informed
people you will ever run into. I have told her
so. She and I agree on practically nothing, but
I’ve always respected her, because she never
showed up for a debate or to make a speech
when she didn’t have her facts.

Janine Hansen was active with the Eagle
Forum. I think that that group, as well as other
groups like it, had a contempt for women—
and still do to this day. They saw us as an
irreligious group because so many of their
positions had developed as a result of their
religious training and beliefs.

The decade between 1973 and 1982 seemed
to produce women who were interested in
social issues. For instance, by September of
1973, we were undoubtedly full steam ahead
because there had been speculation about
major office holders, and many men were
being mentioned as potential candidates. The
Caucus was upset because not a single woman
was mentioned. So I wrote a letter to the
editor, which was picked up in the Las Vegas
paper as well as here, and they wrote editorials
on it. I’m not sure they were too pleased that
they had to admit that we were right—that
women had simply been overlooked and

Becoming a Political Activist

hadn’t even been considered when it came to
advanced offices on the state level.

The major goal of the Women’s Political
Caucus then became to get women to run
for office. In the northern part of the state,
at least, a lot of women candidates came out
of that. There was Jean Ford, who was from
the southern part of the state. Jean was active
politically perhaps even before I was because
she was president of the League of Women
Voters. The northern part and the southern
part of the state didn’t have the ties at that
time that we developed later on. There were
a lot of women activists in the southern part
of the state that didn’t run for office, or who
were not elected. Certainly, Jean served for
a long time and was very active in a lot of
these things.

Nancy Gomes was another woman who
came from the Caucus. She served on the
school board for two terms and then was
elected to the legislature in 1977. I managed
that campaign for her, because we had become
very dose friends.

Mary Frazzini also served in the
legislature. She was elected before the Caucus
came into being in 1973. She finished out one
term, but was beaten the next time she ran.
Through the BPW, Mary decided to put on
a seminar on politics in government. I think
it ran for eight weeks. They talked about
running political campaigns—how to get
involved and about contacting both state and
national legislators. That one really had me
fired up politically!

There was Mary Gojack, who served in the
state assembly in 1973. From 1975 to 1977,
she served in the state senate. She ran in 1980
against Paul Laxalt for his United States Senate
seat, and was always a champion of the poor
and women’s issues. I’m sure it was obvious
that she wasn’t going to be a winner, but at
the same time you have to start somewhere.

Mary also lost in the race in 1982 for the US.
House of Representatives seat against Barbara
Vucanovich.

Eleanor Waugh ran for the state assembly
in 1972. She was not elected, but she came
out of the Caucus. She was a Republican,
incidentally, but she was very strong on
women’s issues and also on a lot of social
issues. I did not personally work on her
campaign because I had my hands full with
others. In 1976, Elbe ran for the assembly as
an independent, and lost again.

Maya Miller was someone the Caucus
supported. She demonstrated great convictions
in taking on what was almost surely a losing
race against Harry Reid for the Democratic
nomination to the United States Senate in
1974. She took on the race because we were
encouraging women to run, to speak out and
be heard, and to make the issues that were
important to us a part of the public record.
Despite the fact that she was defeated, Maya
has remained a strong advocate of women’s
rights. She has been a tremendous help to
women, not just collectively or as groups,
but as individuals. I can cite a number of
cases where individuals who needed help
or had problems were helped by Maya. She
has always been a champion of the poor and
minorities, too. I was her treasurer, and her
campaign manager, Ken Bode, came out of
Washington, D.C. He is now the political
analyst for NBC National News. It’s kind of
interesting to note that.

It sounds rather foolish to say that the
Caucus really worked hard to find qualified
women, because certainly no one ever
demanded that qualified men run for office.
I think that the history of incompetent
legislators and local officials bears that out.
So while women were expected to be highly
qualified for anything they wanted, it was not

Barbara Bennett

also a demand upon men who chose to run
for the same offices.

Obviously, the Caucus never supported
anyone who did not understand women’s
issues and did not at least have empathy for
them. But we supported men coming from
the same positions who were knowledgeable
about womens and social issues. So we were
never simply a we’re-going-to-throw-out-
all-the-men-and-put-women-in-their-places
kind of an organization.

Though many candidates supported by
the Caucus lost, you have to start somewhere.
You have to get your name out there, because
the name recognition is absolutely essential.
More than anything else, I believe, it has been
women who forced discussion of issues that
are important to women. We talked about
health care, for instance. Those issues came
to the floor because women wanted to discuss

them, and forced discussions on them.

When Mary Gojack ran in 1982, she ran

against Barbara Vucanovich for the U.S. House
of Representatives. Barbara Vucanovich and
her daughter, Patty Cafferata, have been very
active. But when you encourage women to
run for office, you can’t encourage only those
who agree with you. When we encourage
women to run for office, we believe that they
should stand on a record, if they have one,
or on their position on issues. Even back

then, single mothers trying to survive with
children were a major issue and had our
attention. Discrimination also caught a lot
of our attention and time. The aims of the
Caucus were really tremendous, but charges
were levied against us by right-wing fringe
people that we were out to break up the family.
We still hear those charges today, which is
absolutely asinine. It’s the last thing in the
world that a woman with a mind wants to do.

Abortion was not an issue right at that
time. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember

exactly when it became a much bigger issue—
probably after the Supreme Court ruling, but
I really don’t remember.

One thing we were aware of was that the
Reno City Council did not have a woman on
any board or commission in 1975 that I’m
aware of. On the other hand, men rampantly
used these posts as stepping stones into politics:
you serve on a board or commission; you
learn about how government is functioning;
you develop some name recognition; and
you move on from there another step up the
ladder. And when women are denied those
kinds of roles in a community, it makes it very
difficult for them to advance. It also makes
it absolutely shocking when someone like
myself is ultimately elected mayor.

The Equal Rights Amendment was
introduced in the legislature in resolution
form in 1973 and it didn’t get anywhere. Then
in 1975 I guess the assembly passed it but the
senate rejected it. I still have a tile of letters from
people like Bill Raggio discussing our efforts
on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, for
which we testified, and the contacts we made
with the legislators down there.

In 1977 we really went after it. We
attempted to get some help from the Women’s
Political Caucus in California, which had
enjoyed a certain degree of success in
getting it ratified there. I went down there
and developed a course for training women
about the facts of ERA and the problems that
we were facing—why we needed it, how to
testify before the legislature, and a progression
of things that we ought to be doing to be
as effective as we possibly could. Our two
groups worked together in developing this
spelled-out program for all of the steps that
we were going to take, how we were going to
get women down to the legislature, get them
to write letters, and get petitions going. It was

Becoming a Political Activist

an educational process to really cover all of the
issues that comprised what we believed to be
the need for the Equal Rights Amendment.
But it didn’t pay off.

The opposition was extremely well
organized and very well financed. The
Mormon church was certainly one of the
major movers—or at least members—behind
it. I know that the Mormon church would
object to it being said that they were behind
it, but it was always our impression that they
certainly played a very important role in
the loss of the Equal Rights Amendment. I
remember sitting in the legislature and seeing
these Mormon women dragging their little
kids up to the stand and screaming about
sharing bathrooms, [laughs] I thought we
had it made, and couldn’t believe it when
those kinds of arguments were the ones that
cropped up nationwide.

At first a husband or father or brother
would not want their mother or another
female member of their family to be denied
an opportunity to perform a job that they
were perfectly capable of doing—one that
would permit them to make a salary equal to
or at least somewhat equal to those men were
making at that time. And yet, when it came
time, all of this went out the window and it
was emotion that ruled from then on. it is a
very difficult, if not impossible, thing to deal
with. How do you argue with someone who
says, “We’re not going to have women using
the same toilets as men,” when they’d been
using them on airplanes for 50 years. I just
don’t understand it

That was only one of their arguments;
then the religious arguments came into it.
This is a religious country, and so when
they convinced people that somehow the
relationship between man, woman and family
would be destructibly altered because of the
Equal Rights Amendment, that was it.

Of course, when abortion became an
issue, we saw a lot of Catholic women coming
in, too, who had very strong opinions. Many
of them did agree with us on social issues, but
they remain completely at odds with support
for the abortion issue.

One of the things that was so frustrating
and angering is that Janine Hansen at that
time, for instance, ran for Congress. Janine
Hansen was so busy with so many issues, she
never had time to be at home with her family.
She got a divorce. So here she was doing all of
the things that she was saying that the Equal
Rights Amendment was going to compel all
other women to do.... I have never believed
in attacking on a personal level, and did not
attack her that time on that level. Sometimes
I wonder if we shouldn’t have dealt with it,
because we didn’t play their game and they
creamed us.

When we couldn’t get the federal ERA
passed, we decided to make an effort for a
state ERA. But we couldn’t even get it off the
ground. The same people opposed it, and they
were able to convince the same legislators to
oppose it on all the same grounds. But there
were many women—not Janine Hansens, but
just ordinary women—who opposed the ERA.
They were afraid to be taken down off this so-
called pedestal and be forced out of the home
to go to work. They believed that they would
be forced to have their children cared for in
a communist-type child care setting. All of
those arguments were reaching ill-informed
women, and they did have an impact, there’s
no question about it.

The ultra-conservative elements
marshalled their forces and were very
important in the defeat of the ERA. The other
thing is that there was not enough money to
really go after the ERA. Then there is also the
political fact of life, whether it evolves around
an issue of that sort or electing someone:

Barbara Bennett

once you are put on the defensive, you may as
well forget it. And we were on the defensive
at the time. Despite our efforts, the ERA
was rejected by the assembly, though it did
pass the senate—just the opposite of what
happened in 1975. Then in 1978, it was again
defeated by a referendum vote in the state.

Though the ERA was defeated, Nevada
women did gain some things in state
legislation, like equality in credit rating and
equal opportunity in jobs. I always had the
feeling that that was sort of an apology on
behalf of legislators. It was a “sop,” so to speak,
because they refused to pass the ERA—they
felt freer in being able to say, “Well, we don’t
really need the ERA now, we’ve taken care of
all the laws that were discriminatory, so now
we’re fine.”

But there’s one major difference, though:
when you do that on a state level, it’s always
possible to change those laws that have passed.
Any law of that significance, in my opinion,
ought to be a national law. You shouldn’t be
able to go from one state to the next and have
your fights either abridged or denied because
of some quirk.

The ERA is a dead issue now, because
many of the laws that were so offensive to us
have been changed as a result of our efforts
to do something about it. If there appears
on the horizon another one that we find
extremely offensive, I feel that we have a good
opportunity of getting it changed, because
women understand that issue now. The
majority of them-children or no children—
are having to work outside of the home. Today
women have advanced and have a better
chance at equality than they did 15 or 20 years
ago because of the individual legislation that
has been passed. Attitudes have also changed.

An example of changing attitudes involves
our oldest daughter. She went to work for the
telephone company as an operator 18 years

ago. For about the past seven or eight years,
maybe even longer, she has been in jobs that
were previously exclusively male. She makes
very good money. She’s one of only four
in the state, and the only woman that does
work involving special electronic switching
systems. Sherry is an expert. She travels to all
of these places, and makes fantastic money.
Those doors would never have opened to her
or other women just like her, and there’s a lot
of instances like that, just at the telephone
company—you see them all over town. Look
at the women you see now in construction
that never were there before. You see them
in engineering, where they could go on to
the university, get a degree and never get a
job as an engineer anyplace because they
couldn’t be hired. All of that has changed.
Some marvelous things have come out of it.

Attitudes have changed because this is a
changed world in which these young women
are living. That “privilege” has been theirs
from the day that they started school, because
some of us cared enough to try to change
things. Unfortunately, so many of them take
it for granted. It’s sort of like labor unionism.
They don’t understand that there were people
out there on the lines working to change these
things all through the years in order to permit
them to do the things that they can do today.
They think nothing of it, though, because it’s
just their right. The right has always been
there, but it was denied to a lot of people.

The Equal Rights Amendment won’t come
up again because it’s just an emotional thing
now that probably isn’t needed. I certainly
don’t see it coming back in Nevada. I don’t
even see the federal government taking it on
again. As a matter of fact, I would be opposed
to trying to do that at this point in time when
there are so many other currently critical
issues involving children having children.
And we have the issue of the single working

Becoming a Political Activist

mother trying to raise children. It’s good to
know, especially in retrospect, that you can
lose a battle that’s so important to you and
still have the ultimate results of the issues
raised during that time come out in a very
favorable way

In 1974,1 think, the owner of the mobile
home park in which we still live began to
hit us with absolutely atrocious increases.
We had bought a mobile home because we
thought it was a place that we would retire
that we could afford. The space rent was $75
a month, and rental increases were jumping
gigantically—$35 at a crack. You’d get one and
then six months later you’d get another one. It
was simply an attitude of all the market would
bear, because we had severe housing shortages
and problems at that time.

With the help of Florence Gird, I founded
the Northern Nevada Mobile Homeowners
Association. We did a lot of lobbying, because
the laws that were on the books were entirely
slanted toward the benefit of landlords. You
had very few rights. We enjoyed some degree
of success in getting some laws changed down
there, but we couldn’t do anything about the
outrageous increases that were forcing many
of the elderly out of the mobile home parks
all over the area. Many had bought retirement
homes and found that their space costs
increased. Some were walking away from it,
because they simply could not afford them.

The really ironic situation was that
so many people were being forced into
subsidized housing because they had to leave
the mobile home parks. A new Volunteers
of America building was constructed, and I
don’t know how many elderly people from the
mobile home park just left their homes and
moved in there, because they said they could
not tolerate the increases. And that was only
a small piece of it. There were family parks

in town with a couple of children in them
where the parents were hard pressed to buy
a home and pay the initial rent even without
all of these increases coming along. So we
moved in the direction of rent justification...
not rent control. We were saying, “All right.
We understand that if your expenses are
increasing, you have a right to increase our
space rent accordingly. If your taxes increase,
we expect an increase. But we do not expect to
get these increases when your taxes have been
lowered. You paid less than you did last year.
Your costs of operating are not significantly
higher than they were a year ago, and rent
increases far exceed anything that you could
possibly justify.”

So that became a local issue which
involved the mobile home people. There are
thousands of us in this community. That led
me to city council meetings—to attempt to
get this rent justification ordinance passed. Ed
Spoon was a member of the Reno City Council
at that time. He said he would introduce the
legislation for us, and he did. However, when
it came time to be heard before the council,
Ed Spoon said, “I introduced the legislation,
but I’m going to vote against it”—which really,
absolutely, was a political double cross. There’s
no other word for it. Therefore we didn’t have
a good chance to get it through, but we had
made headway in pointing out the problems
to the legislature. Sooner or later, we felt that
we could convince the city council that it was
a real problem in this community. And it was,
there’s no question about it.

We lost the battle, but we won in the
sense that we changed a lot of laws that really
benefitted mobile home people. For instance,
we effected many roles, such as park owners
have to give you notice of several months
before they increase space rent, and if they
sell the park and you have to move, they have
to pay the expenses for doing some of this. A

Barbara Bennett

lot of protections were built into the law that
had never existed.

The gains that we made were at the state
level in the legislature rather than the city. The
greatest degree of success that we enjoyed with
legislators was in proving to them that there
was a very serious problem with mobile home
tenants being ripped off in this state. There
was a large group down in Las Vegas at that
time which became pretty powerful, so we had
legislators on both ends of the state listening
to us. They recognized that the problem was
statewide and that it wasn’t just something
that we dealt with here. They told mobile park
tenants and owners that if these same kinds
of conditions existed at the next session of the
legislature, they would be willing to look very
hard at some rent justification means.

As far as activism and my family life
is concerned, I’m one of those fortunate
women that has a husband who was never
a chauvinist. The children’s lives were not
impacted in any negative way, and while
they did not show any interest at that time in
what I was doing, times have changed. They
have moved into some areas now where they
are involved and where they care about the
issues. But back then they were taken up
with far more important things than social
issues—like the latest record that had come
out. [laughs] Back in the 1960s, though, there
were some teenagers who were interested
in social issues. It seems like that was more
common then than it is today. I think my
children knew some of the things that were
going on. They were upset over the Vietnam
War, but not so upset that they would really
become involved in doing anything about it.
They weren’t out on any lines picketing or
doing anything of that sort. Their involvement
has come much later in life.

My activism and concerns have had
an influence, but all youngsters go in their
own direction, you know. I’m sure that my
concerns about social issues are really shared
by everyone in the family, so that’s a very
worthwhile by-product of my involvements.
At the same time, it was rare if I didn’t manage
to make it home to get dinner on the table.

County Commission and
City Council Campaigns

I ran for the Washoe County Commission
in 1975.1 had talked it over with John, and by
then the kids were pretty much on their own. I
didn’t have a specific goal, but I did want to be
a city council or county commission member.
I was interested in the county commission
because of a lot of things that were happening,
but I had not thought in terms of being the
mayor at that point in time. While I was
known for little bitty things, I really didn’t
have sufficient name recognition.

In 1974, about a year before I ran for
County Commissioner, the Blue Ribbon Task
Force Report came in. The task force was a
project of the Regional Planning Commission
and Area Council of Governments. It was
intended to come up with a design for the
future of the area. Many active, well-informed
people served on the Task Force.

I suppose I’m one of the very few in the
area who read the entire report—not once but
many times. It was ten volumes. I had occasion
to refer to them many times throughout the
years. But the recommendations in there were
so wise, so well thought out and researched.

The reports dealt with water, transportation,
education, the quality of life, air quality... there
were so many of them.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force Reports
were certainly one of the main reasons that I
ran for county commissioner, and I strongly
advocated that their recommendations be
seriously considered and become a part of
law. But you’re dealing with elected officials,
and recommendations are one thing. I think
it’s criminal that all of that hard work and
tremendous knowledge that went into the
Blue Ribbon reports and recommendations
were not followed. If these things had been
put into practice, we would not have reached
the state where we are today...we absolutely
should not have, because we were warned.

As a matter of fact, there was a planner
named Richard Eckert who wrote a very
lengthy editorial in 1975. It said, “We are in an
area where the population is going to exceed
a quarter of a million; winter months will
feature constant smog and carbon monoxide
health hazards; most of the influx of persons
will be low-paid gaming industry employees

Barbara Bennett

unable to afford housing in the swanky new
subdivisions. High-density apartments will
spring up everywhere...

He also predicted that in order to finance
police and fire protection, education, and
other essential services, property taxes would
soar. Obviously these things happened and
tax payers rose up in arms, and we wound
up with the legislature putting a cap on what
we could do. He also predicted that the crime
rate would rise, the demand for water would
triple, and there would be chronic shortages.
I made a note in the margin of the article that
says, “How prophetic.”

I’ve discussed this with other people who
really care about the quality of life. At the
same time I’m aware of how important it is
for people to have jobs, because I’ve had to
work my whole life.... It’s not an unimportant
matter. However, it has always been my
argument that this community is fragile and it
can only stand so much development. What is
important is whether we are going to have that
development in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years,
or whether we are going to cram it all in at
one time, where we suffer all of the problems
that Richard Eckert described.

I went on to actually preach about water
for years, because our water situation back
in 1977 was absolutely critical. That was the
drought year of 1977-1978, and the people
of the community cooperated beautifully.
We all put bricks in our toilets and shower
restrictors in, and we saved water. We were
very conscientious about it. What was so
damaging and so destructive to the public
attitude at that time was the fact that the
politicians were giving away more and more of
our resources that we simply could not afford.

Ironically, a separate water report came
in at that time. The committee that wrote the
report was comprised of some water experts,
but more importantly of the really pro-growth

advocates who felt that nothing could stand
in the way of development. They thought
we had absolutely no problems with a water
shortage, whereas many other people who
knew the history of this area thought that we
were heading for trouble. Yet all of the time
we had been skimming along for many years,
with Sierra Pacific having to acquire new
water rights in order to serve new projects.

There are elected officials and those in the
development community who believe that
you absolutely have to have a three percent
rate of growth in order to keep from being
a dying city, which is idiotic. There are many
cities across this country that don’t grow at
all or grow barely one percent a year that are
very successful. So that just isn’t true. But the
real danger in that kind of thinking is that if
you compound a three-and-a-half, four-and-
a-half percent growth rate every year for 20
years, you don’t have a three percent growth
rate at the end of the road—you’ve got a
significantly higher percentage of growth. But
no one was ever willing to deal with planned
growth in terms of not approving projects
in excess of our ability to provide necessary
resources. In my way of thinking, there lies
the entire problem, even today.

Growth was one of my campaign issues
when I ran for County Commission. Mine
was not really an active campaign, because
that was at the same time that Maya was
running for the Senate. Her campaign took
up a great deal of my time because the records
had to be so precise, so honest, so accurate.
We were not about to place women in a
position where they could be criticized for
being wrong, so that took a great deal of time
and I was also working full-time.

I got my name out there, discussed
things whenever the opportunity arose, but
I never made any effort to raise funds, and I
did very little in the way of printing. I had a

County Commission and City Council Campaigns

card printed up with my major positions on
it, and I walked when I could. A few people
walked with me, but it was not a hard-hitting
campaign—the kind that you have to mount
if you want to be elected. But this was my
first attempt to get my name out there. As a
matter of fact, it surprised the daylights out of
me when I decided to run for office. But the
womens issues led me into that. I had never
considered running for office, never.

I have always been willing to do homework.
To this day, I hate to lose an argument because
I didn’t do enough background checking on
it. I lost a terrible debate one time because I
didn’t do enough homework, and I learned
a good lesson from it. When you get into
reading these things and you form your own
opinions and conclusions, you don’t want to
just keep them to yourself if the issues are as
important as they seem to be.

I spent a lot of time talking to women’s
groups, senior groups, mobile home tenants,
and others. If I had an opportunity to talk
about the kinds of things that affected
their lives, then I wanted to do that. In the
beginning I was a very nervous public speaker,
but the Toastmistress Club helped a lot with
that. Toastmistress teaches people how to
relax and speak to the public. They are very
effective, and it was a tremendous help to
me. Ultimately I became a very accomplished
public speaker. Always behind that was the
fact that my homework was done thoroughly.
If someone threw a question at me from the
audience, I wasn’t surprised or shocked, and
I didn’t say, “No comment”

I never got through the primary for the
race for County Commissioner-nor did
the man who defeated me win the general
election. So that was that. But the important
thing was that my name got out there—there
had been some more people who had heard
about me that never knew of me before. As it

happened, the media had found the tenants’
battle to be very interesting and gave us a lot of
coverage, which also put my name out front.

I don’t think that there was anyone elected
to the commission at that time with whom
I agreed on the growth issue. Some people
liked to talk about growth on the County
Commission, just like some of them did on
the Reno City Council. But it was what they
considered to be growth, not the kind of terms
that I was talking about—that we should be
limiting growth in this community because of
our resources. I also thought that we should
be diversifying so that we wouldn’t build a
population of low-paid, low-income families
and single individuals who couldn’t afford to
buy a home in this community.

After I was defeated for the commission
post in 1974,1 ran for City Council in 1977.
Again, the growth issue was important to
me. Most of the important things in the area
of growth were taking place in the city of
Reno at that time. This was during a time
when we were getting into this huge boom
situation—the time of the construction of the
MGM hotel-casino.... There was definitely a
pro-growth council, and almost everything
was breezing right through. This was after
some of the drought years, and some people
really resented it. After all, Reno residents
had put bricks in their toilets to save water,
and then all of these casinos were approved
by the City Council. The residents were well
aware of this—more so than the elected
representatives, who, unfortunately, have a
tendency to only surround themselves and
mix with those people who think as they do.
But if you’re not talking to the general public,
you only hear that everything’s OK from your
friends and business associates. So it was very
difficult for the elected officials to believe that
not everyone was perfectly happy to have an
MGM hotel in this city.

Barbara Bennett

When I ran for City Council in 1977, there
was a group of businessmen that had selected
a slate of candidates. They endorsed Bruno
Menicucci, who was running for reelection
at that time. I don’t remember some of the
others except for Ed Oaks. There was a very
pro-business endorsement, which you would
expect to come from a pro-business group.

The contractors had a great deal to say,
and they also had the money to pour into
races, which is no small matter when it comes
to being elected to office. Out of that group,
the one that they endorsed in the large race
that I ran in was Bill Wallace, who defeated
me for the City Council seat.

During the 1977 race, the public was very
upset about what was happening, but there
was absolutely no organization—everyone
was fragmented. Some individuals did speak
out. I think Bill Eadington, a professor of
economics at the university, always had to
be careful about what he said on the growth
issue, and probably still does. Ultimately, it
was his opinion—it’s not fact. I worked with
Margaret Eadington a little on the growth
issue. I certainly relied on Bill because he did
a lot of the writing on gaming and growth.
He wrote from a standpoint of economics,
not just from an interest in growth. I was a
fan of his and still am to this day, because I
consider him a well-rounded, very sane asset
to this community.

There was a lot of pressure and heat put on
a number of professors at the university about
this growth situation. As a matter of fact, there
were even articles written in the paper about it.
The business community said that they didn’t
like contributing to the university when some
professors were speaking against what they
thought were their growth interests. But what
the professors were speaking about was some
sanity of growth in this community. They
were not speaking in opposition to business

interests. That resulted in putting kind of a
“gag order” on these people, I assume, because
most of them have been very quiet ever since
then. Dick Sill was someone who spoke out
very strongly about the air quality. He’s dead
now, but I can’t imagine ever putting a gag
order on Dick Sill, [laughs]

During the race I didn’t get much up¬
front support from people in the university
community. I’m sure there was a great deal
of quiet support behind the scenes, though.
Those who supported me knew where I
stood on growth. The race, like all City
Council races, was non-partisan. I always
did everything I could to keep it that way,
too. I never let party politics get into the City
Council.

We worked harder on the City Council
race than we had on the commission race.
We did more door-to-dooring because by
that time I had retired and had more time.
We still didn’t raise very much money. I’ve
always strenuously objected to the cost of
campaigning. Of course, it has become
vulgar since that time. I felt one should run a
campaign on as little money as possible, using
volunteers, and I always did that—always. I
think I only collected about $1,400 in the 1977
race because I never solicited money a lot.
Nancy Gomes wrote a letter on my behalf to
supporters of hers. We rote a letter, of course,
seeking the support of the members of the
Women’s Political Caucus, and there were
people who came through with small amounts
of money—but not the $500 contributions
that the important people attract. These were
small, person-to-person donations, and it was
enough to get the job done.

People were just beginning to pay attention
to the issues, and the paper was beginning to
quote me in a few places here and there. Then,
in September, 1977,1 was asked by the Nevada
State League of Cities to be a speaker up at its

County Commission and City Council Campaigns

meeting in Ely. All of the council members
and mayors from all over the state attended
this event. At that time, housing was a crucial
issue because the MGM Grand was being
completed and thousands of people were
moving to Reno to work there. Plus Harrah’s
had expanded and they put in other new
hotel-casinos. They were all labor-intensive
industries, and if you have labor-intensive
industries you have to have housing. As it was,
there was already a terrible housing crunch
in the area.

Anyway, housing, obviously, was a major
problem during that time, and I addressed
that issue when I was at the League of
Cities meeting in Ely. I said, “Even the
most die-hard, unlimited growth advocates
will eventually realize that we’ve created a
monster. Washoe County could be faced
with serious multimillion-dollar school
bond issues, and more real estate inflation if
something isn’t done to control growth. We
might even have to consider a year-round
school to handle all the kids.” We’re still living
with new multimillion-dollar bond issues for
almost everything we want to do, as well as
rising real estate costs.

Those costs at the time were among
the absolute highest in the country. Keep
that in the context of a community which
has always had 50 percent of the jobs being
service-oriented. I think that the percentage
of service jobs in this community now has
reached 70 percent. I said at that time and
have continued to say for many years that
developers should be required to provide
not only environmental impact statements,
but should also be required to deal with
the effects that a project will have in other
areas, such as population, economic impact,
transportation, and resources. The public
mood was one of frustration, because after
people had worked together to save water, the

city council put all the water that had been
saved into development efforts. They didn’t
even have the good judgment to wait for a
year or so. [laughs]

Here today we find ourselves going
through the same kind of situation, and
fortunately some council members have said
that whatever water has been conserved will
be reserved for use in this community, and
will not be allocated for new growth. I hope
they do, because if we don’t, we’re in terrible
trouble. And people haven’t forgotten those
days. Since then, thousands and thousands
of new people have come to this community,
attracted by the jobs, however low-paying
they may be.

No one likes to say, “I told you so,” but I
think it’s important for history to reveal that
none of what we’re experiencing now should
come as a surprise to anyone. There were
enough of us—starting with the Blue Ribbon
Task Force—who worked their tails off on
that. There are many people like myself who
have felt very strongly that we should monitor
and limit—not completely prevent —area
growth, because of the problems attendant
with the growth-related experience.

Bill Wallace ultimately won the 1977 race
for city council. There were 12 candidates in
the primary—that was a very loaded field. It
was for the at-large seat for the city council.
Joe Latimore, who had been a city manager,
and Bill were the two top vote-getters in the
primary, and Bill went on to win. I don’t
remember what other seat was up for election.
There had to have been at least one other seat
up at that time.

There were some interesting things
that happened after my loss in the primary,
because I had essentially been speaking to the
issues of growth, which were really more and
more on the mind of the public at that time.

Barbara Bennett

When the new council was seated at the end of
June, there were three councilmen: Ed Spoon,
Ed Oaks, and Bill Wallace. Ed Spoon had
said at that time that all major developments
should be halted until the housing shortage
had been resolved. That’s because there was
an article in the paper dealing with housing.
However, Ed Spoon ended up voting against
very few developments. This was always a
problem that I had with people when they ran
for office: making promises to the public and
either not caring, or conveniently forgetting
them once they had arrived.

Wallace had said that he was very reluctant
to approve any more large commercial
developments, and in fact he didn’t support
everything that came along. I had no problem
with Bill’s integrity. He changed his mind on
some occasions, and I believe that he saw it as
being for very good reasons. However, it didn’t
help. After all, he told the public he wasn’t
going to approve any more large commercial
developments.

I did not endorse Bill Wallace when
he ran the second time in 1979, although
he was not a bad man. He was very angry
because I endorsed someone else in the race,
but there was absolutely nothing personal in
it. I endorsed someone whose thoughts and
concerns about growth in this community
were far more compatible with mine than
were those of Bill Wallace. Bill was not 100
percent in favor of all of these things that
were still going on after he was elected. He
was occasionally a voice of reason, but that
was not often enough.

When I lost the race for City Council, I
think I leaned some things. For one thing,
you learn from each and every campaign.
You become more professional in how you go
about it, how to write a better press release,

and how to get publicity that’s free, among
other things. You have to learn these things
if you’re running. In other words, you learn
a lot more about organizing a campaign. You
also learn about the pitfalls of a campaign.
You learn that there’s always someone out
there who wants to make you over into what
they perceive to be the public image of an
acceptable candidate or elected official. For
instance, people in the community who have
seen you for years know what you look like.
I’ll begin dressing like Liz Taylor and running
around with a lot of makeup, in the first place
I’d bankrupt myself, in the second place I’d be
changing myself when in fact I have no desire
to change. I am what I am and I want people
to know that if I’m elected, this is what they’re
getting. But I did have people in my campaign
suggest just that.

A few years ago Barbara Vucanovich
rinsed her hair a gray-blue, and people
began to talk about her blue hair. I’m sure
that someone told her it was time for her to
let her hair change, but she decided to get
back to brown and not let it change to gray,
[laughs] I’m sure this came as a result of the
people who managed her campaigns, saying
they wanted her to appear as young as possible
to the voting audience out there. That’s only
a part of the image. A woman must not be
too harsh in the way she debates, argues,
or speaks, which can create problems for a
Barbara Bennett.

When I’m committed to things, I can be
very fierce. That’s something that has to be
guarded against. You have to be effective,
make your points strongly with a guard
against being offensive. It’s a very tight line
for someone like me to walk. There are
times when I would just really love to have
spoken my mind to some elements of this
community.... I have gone farther than that,

County Commission and City Council Campaigns

even, a couple of times. It’s a hard line. I have
been very harsh in my criticism of special
interest groups, whether it be developers or
whoever, whenever a group’s self-interest has
taken far greater precedence over the interest
of this community.

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

I decided to run for mayor of Reno. The
primary for the 1979 mayoral election was in
May, and the general election was held in June,
so I really started running in late 1978, getting
my campaign organized. Raising money was
a problem, because I knew that whoever ran
as the darling of the business community
would raise whatever money was necessary.
I had the same group of people working with
me as before, but we had added a lot more
people by then, too—a lot of seniors and a lot
of teachers. We also had the support of a lot of
working mothers, because all of these issues
were being discussed all the time.

I started walking early, and I really had an
opportunity to talk with people. Therefore,
we were just picking up new names all the
time—people that believed in what we were
saying and were willing to help, either with
small contributions or telephone work. Or
sometimes the people would walk in their
neighborhoods or put on a coffee. It was
really a person-to-person campaign. Some
university students were also active. Mostly
the support was behind-the-scenes.

My campaign manager was Mark
Handelsman. He was an attorney in town,
and he is now an elected judge in the Reno
Municipal Court. Mark had worked with me
in the mobile home tenants’ group. He gave
us a lot of free legal help, so we came to know
each other very well. I have a lot of respect for
him, because he’s a very honest man and just
a neat guy. I love him...he reads, he’s nice, he
has a good heart, and he’s honest. Mark was
a big help in the campaign because he had
done some advertising work in addition to
his legal work. We could only afford one radio
spot, even when I ran for mayor. We worked
hard and really organized our effort. We sent
fund-raising letters.

Another person who helped was Don
Richter, who was an insurance man in
town. There were quite a few other business
supporters who were behind the scenes,
because what was happening was beginning
to hurt them. There had been a lot of what
they felt was favoritism in how contracts
were issued, and in how insurance was
purchased for school groups or city or

Barbara Bennett

county government. There was a lot of
dissatisfaction, and people expressed it at
the polls. Contributions to my campaign
came individually. I personally screened
every check that came in, and had to return
some, because I would accept only personal
contributions, not business contributions.

Suppose an insurance man sends you
$50 or $100 or whatever. He has a reason
for that. Maybe he plans to apply to sell
some insurance that the city is going to buy,
although I don’t think there was a lot of that
going on. Or maybe it’s an architect who
has ties to a construction firm and to other
developers. I’m not saying they all do, but I’m
saying that it’s a risk that you can’t take. Either
you’re serious about taking only individual
contributions or you’re not. I was serious
about it.

During the primary campaign for mayor
in 1979, Ed Spoon, Bill Granata, and Bruno
Menicucci were all sitting members of the city
council. Eddie Scott was still active essentially
in the black community in town. Bonnie
Wilson was active in a number of things in the
community, but I don’t remember what they
were. Bonnie’s position on growth, I think,
was not as firm nor as restrictive as I would
have liked, but nevertheless, she was a strong
planned-growth advocate. She ran very well
in the race, incidentally, and in fact, she beat
Ed Spoon. Bruno Menicucci and I came out
on top.

Obviously, we watched the primary
election evening with a great deal of interest.
At about the last hour before the absolute final
returns were in, Bill Granata had been leading
me by a small margin. But I had really learned
how to calculate votes and percentages when
I had managed some political campaigns,
and I thought I would beat Bill Granata. The
reason for that was at that time the returns
from the Stead area were usually the last

ones to come in. I had worked that area well
and knew a lot of people, and I was certain
I would run well out there. Though some
people believe you should try to strengthen
your weak areas, I had always believed in
enforcing your strengths, and that is what I
did. At any rate, when the final results came
in, I think I had won by 230 votes, which
was close, considering there had been a
large turnout. I think there was a 65 percent
turnout or something which is very unusual
for a city primary. I really attribute that to
the fact that people were terribly frustrated
over the problems that growth was creating
in their lives.

Bill Granata’s term was up, but Ed Spoon
and Bruno were still mid-term in their city
council posts, which can create some very
uncomfortable situations. Bill Granata didn’t
come out publicly and endorse me after
his primary defeat, but I think that he was
instrumental in behind-the-scenes help for
me in the general election. He had his own
reasons that he never really chose to discuss
with me, but I always considered him a factor
in that. Also, I think it was clear to most
everyone that I had some behind-the-scenes
support from business. That was because
the longevity of businesses was also being
threatened by the growth situation. After all,
someone’s got to pay for it. New growth never
even begins to pay for itself until it’s been in
place for about 18 months.

During the campaign for the general
election I was opposed to the collateral
sewer plan. It had to do with a consortium of
business development interests wanting to pay
$5 million to add some capacity to the sewer
plant. Bill Wallace and I felt that it was giving
an unfair advantage to them, and that it would
be very unfair to the development of the
community at large. I remember that sewer

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

fees were substantially increased. Obviously,
the necessary additions to the sewer plant
came as an immediate result of area growth.
People who had lived here and paid for sewer
hookups and fees all through the years felt
that new people coming in should pay for
these things.

I was able to walk and cover a lot of Reno,
although even then you couldn’t hit every
house in ton because the city was so large.
We always had a telephone number where
if someone had a question and wanted to
call, they could do so. The impression that I
had in talking with people was really one of
substantial support for the positions that I had
been speaking out on.

I think that people were surprised that I
did as well as I did in the south end of town,
but people at that time had $100,000 or
$200,000 homes there, and they almost had
more to lose than someone else if something
wasn’t done with the growth problems. Here
we are today with the people that moved to
the south end of town, because they wanted
some open space around them; now they find
that this growth is encroaching and the very
quality of life and the reasons for which they
moved out there to begin with are threatened.
So I think that there was far more support in
the south end of town from those people than
anyone anticipated.

Obviously, I had my other supporters. I
had a lot of support from the seniors, because
I had been involved on a voluntary basis
with them in a number of areas. There were
also women’s groups working for me. There
were people from the university working for
me, too. But there were also those who were
hostile. I had the door slammed in my face.
You always will have that from some people,
but not as often as you might expect. For the
most part, if people disagreed with you, they
would say, “Well, I don’t agree with you, but

more power to you or some foolish remark.
But most people are not vicious. A few are, but
not very many. Besides, you’re not going to go
to the front door of one of your opponents.
You do avoid some animosity that way.

During the campaign, the FBI was
investigating the insurance business of my
opponent, Bruno Menicucci, and I think
he blamed his defeat on that. I don’t doubt
that the FBI investigation hurt him some.
Eventually it was dropped. I think it was very
unfortunate, because it hung like a cloud over
his head, and I really didn’t like it. We’ve seen
it happen both in the state and across the
country. I think that they should either have
charged Bruno with something or dropped
it early enough so that it didn’t hang over his
head. I do believe if that investigation had not
been held, I still would have beaten Bruno
because of the votes he’d made on growth and
the position that I had taken.

Bruno never claimed to be a pro-growth
person. He said he was a moderate-growth
person, but actions speak louder than words.
Bruno’s history dearly indicated that he was
very pro-growth, and the public was more
responsive to where I was on growth than
where Bruno’s was.

I didn’t get any support from the
gaming community although I was offered
a contribution by the Nevada Club. Lincoln
Fitzgerald was the owner; he’s dead now.
A woman who worked for Mr. Fitzgerald
called me and asked me to come in because
he wanted to talk to me. That was the only
contact that could be made with him. He
was very elderly and he had some policies
concerning his employees that I rather liked.
I had heard a lot of good things about him. If
you worked for Fitz and you needed help and
were a good employee, you could get help. I
respected him for those things.

Barbara Bennett

I set up an appointment to go in and see
him, and he offered me $1,000, for which I
thanked him, but I refused. He didn’t ask for
anything—he never asked for a thing. He didn’t
say he was going to support me, but I think that
he thought I was going to win. [laughs] I think
he had seen enough elections around, and he
really believed I was going to win. But I told
him I was taking no special interest money.
I had no other contacts with the gaming
community at that time. Some of them took
shots at me; some of them left me alone.

Whenever I went for interviews at the
newspaper, I was asked, of course, about my
attitude about gaming. I didn’t say that we
should never, ever have additional gaming
growth, but I said that in my opinion, it was not
in the best interests of the gaming community
to have additional growth. Warren Lerude, of
the Gazette-Journal, pushed very hard on that.
I don’t know whether he thought he could
get me to change my mind or what, but I just
held firm to my position. He kept asking the
questions over and over again on my attitude
about gaming. I didn’t have any problem with
gaming per se in the community, and they
did pay a lot of taxes in the city. I just did not
feel that we should be a city with all our eggs
in one basket, and I felt that we could not
continue to experience all of this outrageous
growth in hotel-casinos. We should also be
able to bring in some diversified industries.

I think Mr. Lerude had already assumed
that I was anti-gaming, which, of course,
was a wrong assumption, because Reno has
thousands of people working in the industry.
After all, I had always been a working person
and certainly cared about working people.
But, at any rate, he wrote in an editorial that
he felt that my attitude toward gaming was not
healthy. The paper endorsed Bruno, but I won.

Actually, about two weeks before election
day, I knew that I was going to win the race. I

had become very good at figuring percentages
in the election—how much so we were going
to win or lose by—and it’s a system that’s
worked for me on many occasions. I knew
then that I was going to win, and I went
about business as usual. I made sure I never
got cocky, and continued to say the same
things that I bad been saying since 1976, so
there was nothing new. I was locked into the
positions I took.

On May 31, 1979, which was just a week
before the general election, John had a heart
attack. We were at a fund-raising event—a
bean and hot dog fund-raiser out on the river.
John became ill and didn’t say anything to
anyone for a while. Then when I didn’t see
him, I went looking for him, and when I found
him he was really looking awful. I thought,
“Well, I better take him home,” but as we
started to leave, he collapsed. I knew he was
in big trouble. Fortunately, we were walking
by some apartments on the river to get to the
car, and there was a man out in his backyard.
He saw John collapse, and went immediately
and called the paramedics. John’s heart attack
was a severe one. It was his first heart attack,
and he might not have made it if that man
hadn’t called immediately. The paramedics
responded very fast —very fast. John was in
the hospital when we were finishing up the
race, so we pulled in our horns a little bit that
week. He had to have a pacer inserted and a
lot of things done. Anyway, it kind of threw
us for a loop, but he did well while he was in
the hospital.

I’ve been asked if that drew some public
sympathy for me in the race. I think that there
may have been some of that, but I think it also
might have been offset by another attitude,
which was, “Well, this woman’s husband
has a bad heart, and she ought to be home
taking care of him—not sitting at city hall.”

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

So I think some people were probably kind
of upset at me, and I was very upset myself.
But once John was past the danger point, it
wasn’t so bad. We had our work done and we
had some walkers out at that time, and a few
last-minute things to be done. The doctors put
my mind at ease—they said John was going
to recover, and that then they would find out
what needed to be done. John also urged me
to go on with the election. He’s always been
such a strong supporter, and he didn’t want
me to stop. That made it much easier.

One of the things that was of interest by
that time was Joe Conforte [Conforte was the
owner of the Mustang Ranch brothel—[Ed.]
Anyone in politics knew that Joe always had
the most accurate polls around. A week or so
before the general election, he had made me a
three to two favorite, and it turned out he was
right on the button, too. I don’t know why he
did the polls—maybe he was betting, or maybe
he just wanted to know. There were a lot of
people who were benefactors of Joe’s largesse
through the years. Maybe he had somebody in
there that he was interested in. I don’t know.
But he wasn’t a fool when it came to betting,
and his money was on me three to two.

The night of the election, my sister came
up. She and I are very close. She didn’t tell
me until later, but the reason she had wanted
to be here was because she was so sure I was
going to lose and would need to be consoled,
[laughs] I told her, “Don’t worry about it. I’m
going to win.”

She said, “How do you know that?”

I said, “I just know.”

Bill Lewis from the newspaper had made
arrangements to be with me all that night,
and I’m sure someone was assigned to cover
Bruno, too. He was surprised that I thought I
was going to win, too. It was a lovely evening.

As soon as we got the final results, Norma,
my kids and I went on over to the hospital

to see John so we could share the good news
with him. When we went in to see John in
his room, he was so tickled when we came m.
Here he was, having just had a heart attack,
and he was kicking his legs up into the air, he
was just so delighted.

The press had been following us around—
even followed us up to John’s room. They
kept asking me if I wasn’t going to declare
myself a winner. I really wasn’t in a hurry,
and I certainly didn’t want to make any dumb
mistakes at that point in time. So I said, “No,
I’d like to wait for a few more results to come
in? But, as I said, I knew that I had won. I felt
I would win by a substantial margin, but I did
not think I would win three to two. I don’t
know if they were able to locate Bruno—my
recollection is that they weren’t. I had heard
that he was up in the executive area of the
MGM Grand, but I don’t know. The paper
was unable to reach him that night.

Bruno’s loss was not only a shock to
him, but also to the councilmen who were
defeated. In fact, two incumbent councilmen
were defeated. It was one of the throw-the-
rascals-out kinds of times. It was a shock to all
of them. Joe McClelland beat Clyde Biglieri,
and Janice Pine beat Marcel Durant. Clyde
had that run-in with the grand jury hanging
over his head. Years later he was cleared of all
that, but a lot of information was printed that
never should have come out of the grand jury.
He won an award some years later, but I think
that it really hurt him at the time.

Joe McClelland talked about the need
to do something about growth when he was
running for office. But unless you say what’s
to be done about growth, this leaves a big,
broad area. I have always hoped that voters
would pay closer attention to what people
say and question them, particularly when
they make an open-ended statement that
really has no meaning. He was jumping on

Barbara Bennett

the growth bandwagon, but he didn’t want to
lose his source of money from the business
community by saying that he didn’t support
slow growth. At the same time he didn’t want
to lose the voters who did want slow growth,
so he was sitting on the fence, so to speak.

A rather happy note is that Joe was very
good on the social issues. He supported
CPPAB recommendations—that was the
Civilian Policy Planning Advisory Board.
He supported child support for the child
care center that came up; he supported the
appointment of minorities to positions on the
boards and commissions. The only problem
that I had with Joe was growth. Actually, I did
have other problems with Joe, but they were
not political.

In that election of June 1979, the voters
also passed the Rancho San Rafael bond issue,
and they repealed the 3.5 percent tax on food
-that was Mary Gojack’s bill.

When I became mayor, the first problem
that I had, obviously, was to establish the fact
that I was the mayor at the council table and
not Bruno. I had to let them know that I was
not Pat Hardy Lewis, and I was not going to be
pushed around. This had to be done in some
rather obvious ways and in some other more
subtle ways. But I was able to establish that,
despite the fact that they still didn’t like it.

Pat Hardy Lewis had been on the city
council before I became mayor. She was a very
bright lady. She had seen the need for some
direction and policy changes where growth
was concerned in this community, and said
so, but she was consistently voted down at
the council table. She was serving with six
men on the council, and they really gave her
a hard time.

Pat’s city council term was 1973 to 1977,
when she was defeated. That really was too
bad. She was the only person on the council
speaking with a reasonably wise voice about

the growth problems that were already rearing
their head in the community. One of the men
that served on the council with her at that
time was Nick Laud, who said something like,
“Well, we’re doing all right the way we are.
We don’t need any growth control measures;
we don’t need any better zoning ordinances;
we don’t need anything, just leave us alone.”
Of course, they did, and we all saw what
happened.

When Janice Pine and I were due to move
to the council table, I figured that maybe some
of the men thought once again that they were
going to quickly put us in our place. It didn’t
happen. I had chaired a great many meetings
and knew what I wanted to do. I didn’t have
any doubts about my ability to perform in
the job, even though there’s no school that
teaches you how to be a mayor. Believe me,
it’s an on-the-job experience.

Surprisingly, I was not nervous in the
beginning. I was very confident, but not
cocky. I knew things were going to come up
that I didn’t know how to handle. But at that
point in time I relied on Henry Etchemendy,
who was the city manager. He had gone over
the agenda and told us how the council had
handled things in the past, so that I knew
where I was going. The city manager always
sits next to the mayor, because they are ones
that have been out doing all this background
work, and you need to have him close by to
talk to him.

Henry was a great help in my getting
through the first session’s agenda, which as
I recall that particular day, did not have any
controversial items. I think it was because
there was a swearing-in process and they
didn’t want to kill us new members—Janice
and me—right the first day. [laughs] Janice
Pine is no longer on the council. She certainly
wasn’t as tough as I’ve been, and you can’t
really fault her for that. Janice and Bill Wallace

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

were honest people. I’m not saying that the
others weren’t, because I think the differences
were largely philosophical. But the problem
that I had with Janice Pine was that she was
turned around by the big boys in town. I don’t
know whether it was just that the pressures
that were brought to bear on her did it, or
whether they were able to change her mind.
I never did know, but it was a problem for
me, because Janice would one time vote one
way, and then another time differently. It
was my opinion that someone got to her and
somehow managed to change her opinion.

Janice was from the Crumley family. The
Crumleys and Pines were two of the most
powerful families in the state. Janice’s father-
in-law, Newton Crumley, had a great many
interests in the community, and still does.
Her mother-in-law served on the board of
directors at Harrah’s and Sierra Pacific Power
Company. I guess she might have bent to
family pressures or pressure from others. At
any rate, she never offered the help that I had
really expected from her. I had hoped that she
would be a strong supporter on the council for
the kinds of things that I wanted to get done,
and she was not.

During my first two years as mayor, I had
no big allies. There was no one. [laughs] Boy,
that was a rough two years, because I still had
Bruno and Ed Spoon on the council with me,
and they had never wanted me there to begin
with. There were bound to be hard feelings, so
it was very tough trying to get anything done.

I relied a great deal on the press to get
information to the public, such as public
hearings. The people were my lifeline in
the community at that time. Fortunately,
they were serious enough about what was
happening to show up at these hearings
and let their feelings be known, because the
development interests were out in force at

every single community meeting we had.
They spoke out in the city daily about what
they felt should be accomplished as opposed
to what the people felt should be restricted.

The first meeting I had after the election
was with the Certified Public Accountants
group in town. We met down at the Sands,
and I was the speaker that night. This was very
shortly after I’d been elected—maybe only a
week or two later. Many of them told me after
the talk that they hadn’t thought I had known
enough to be mayor. When we talked about
the issues that night, a couple of things came
out: they said I could think fast on my feet
because I knew the background, and that I
was an effective speaker. That gives your ego
a bit of a boost, so the next time you’re not
so afraid of facing this same kind of group of
intelligent, fairly well-informed people.

Because the office of mayor is so public,
I attended literally hundreds of luncheons,
dinners, and meetings, and I was active in a
lot of commissions. I was getting a pretty good
press, not because I think they were bending
over one way or another, but because they
were honestly reporting what I had said. There
was a certain amount of resentment among
some of the council members because of that,
but when I had my lumps coming, they gave
it to me, too.

I never had a problem with the press.
I felt that we had better have a press that
prints things whether we like them or not.
If they don’t tell us, who’s going to tell us?
I’m thoroughly opposed to any kind of
censorship, and I think a free press is vital to
any hopes we have of retaining some of the
democratic principles on which this country
is supposed to operate—it doesn’t always, but
it’s supposed to.

I was challenged at times later on in
some subtle ways and not so subtle ways,

Barbara Bennett

and I do have at times a very short fuse. I
remember one instance when Bill Wallace
said something that really made me angry-I
don’t remember what it was. I just jumped up
on my chair. I think from then on there never
was really a doubt at that table that I was going
to defend myself and not be pushed around by
any interests—either those sitting at the table
or outside the council.

When everyone on the council was
appointed to serve on certain boards and
commissions, I appointed myself to the
Regional Transportation Board. That was
because there was a critical need for improving
our public transportation system. I served on
that during my entire time at city hall, and that
was the period of growth. I do not personally
take any credit for that. Jerry Hall headed up
the Regional Transportation Commission,
and still does. He was very good at what
he did—a very forceful guy. He is now the
executive director of Citifare. Sometimes he’s
too pushy... Jerry likes to be able to control
everything. As a result of that, recently he’s
had a bout with Elderport, and he’s been
forced to make some changes which I don’t
really approve of.

Jerry was a great planner, and he saw the
need for efficient public transportation. The
Regional Transportation Commission was
supportive of him, and government bucks were
still available in the early days, which was a
great help, If we were to try to get that kind of
system on line today, I don’t think we could do
it, because the government dollars are just not
that available. They had a budget then that was
designed to at least carry them through that
year and maybe into the next year. Therefore,
the monies didn’t diminish that quickly in
the beginning. Ultimately, though, they did,
because he wanted them stopped. But you don’t
stop government budget processes overnight,
so we continued to get some substantial

funding, which was absolutely necessary. At
that time, as I recall, a new bus cost $40,000.
I would venture a guess that today that same
bus is probably costing $65,000.

I am satisfied with our bus system, and I
think that generally speaking, we have one of
the better public transportation systems going.
The credit is largely due to Jerry Hall’s efforts.

When I was elected m 1979,1 was the first
publicly-elected mayor in Reno since the early
1960s, and the first woman to ever be elected
in the city of Reno. There was a story about it
in Newsweek. Back in the 1960s, Bud Baker
was a popularly elected mayor, but then the
process changed so that we had a council-
manager form of government. But in 1979, the
process changed once again so that the mayor
would be elected. I was the first mayor under
that new system to be elected. Now we have
a manager-council form of government, and
the law prohibits councilmen from interfering
in the responsibilities of a city manager. The
city manager, under the city charter, runs the
city. The city council members are prohibited
from interfering in that management, which
is certainly wrong. The city manger is not
accountable to anyone; he is appointed by
the council. They say it keeps politics out of
it, but that’s asinine, because there’s always
going to be a majority on the council who
are of one opinion or another. That majority
is going to rule at the council table. They’re
going to decide who sits at the Reno Planning
Commission, which is critical. They’re going
to decide who is city manager; they’re going
to decide the ordinances; they’re going to
decide zoning laws; they’re going to decide
everything. Of course, we have had a pro¬
growth council for all of those years.

Nobody that has a majority vote is going
to pick a city manager who advocates slow
growth or planned growth—that’s not their

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

bag. The city manager has to do what the city
council votes for, in a sense. But at the same
time, the council is almost solely dependent
upon this manager to provide them with
information about city departments. When
the council wants to get something done,
they have to say to the city manager, “Get
us this information.’ And that person is in a
position to provide that information in any
way he sees fit.

One of the issues that Ed Spoon had
raised in the primary was Hank Etchemendy,
the city manager. He felt Hank should go,
because he wasn’t offering any leadership. Of
course, in my opinion, it’s not up to the city
manager to offer the leadership. That should
be coming from the council and the mayor. It
was either that, or perhaps he felt that Henry
was too timid in his dealings with the council
members. I don’t really know... I don’t recall
that Ed ever told me what his specific reasons
were for wanting to get rid of Etchemendy,
other than he felt that he really wasn’t a strong
guiding hand in there.

Before the election I had been asked about
it, and I said that I wasn’t in a position to make
a judgment until I had been there and knew
what was going on. Ed did bring it up, but it
was not pursued immediately, because I don’t
think that the votes were there. I think that
Janice and Bill, along with myself, certainly
wanted to know a little more. I don’t know
what Joe McClelland’s position was, but I
think that he also wanted to know a little bit
more about the situation before we took any
further steps.

Ultimately I did have a problem with
Henry. It dealt with the fact that I wanted
some information that I hadn’t received at
city hall. We still had a Regional Planning
Commission at that time, and I went over
there to talk with someone and get the
information that I wanted. Apparently, the

person I talked to got back to Etchemendy,
and Etchemendy raised hell with the guy for
giving me the information. When I found that
out, I went to Hank and told him that I didn’t
want anyone being told that I could not be
provided with information that I requested.

I didn’t have any staff that could get me
information when I needed it. I always did it
myself, which was one of the reasons why I
advocated very early on for more money for
the mayor. In the first place, it was literally
a 12-hour-a-day job, and your weekends
were never your own, because you were
expected to be at a banquet or an opening
or a ribbon cutting or someplace else. It was
a tremendously time-consuming job, if you
took it seriously and did the work, keeping
in touch with the public. I went on having
neighborhood meetings in people’s homes
to feel them out and understand where they
were coming from, and to listen to them as
well as have them listen to me. So it was very
time consuming.

The mayor’s salary was $10,000, and that
was the gross. That wasn’t the net, of course.
The only expenses that I had—and I think it
only happened on maybe two occasions—was
when I had to take someone to lunch on city
business. The other thing that I did submit
was my gas expenses, because I was putting a
tremendous amount of money into gas. That
only reimburses you for some of the expenses.
I never ever submitted big bills for anything,
because I think that the public as well as the
council made it clear that they didn’t want
to pay the mayor any more money. I wasn’t
about to get some of the salary that I thought
I should be earning by submitting expense
accounts that were outrageous. They were
always very reasonable.

I took the idea to the council of possibly
having a form of government other than

Barbara Bennett

council-manager. Of course, the defecate hit
the fan on that one, because it was seen as a
power play. I can understand why it would be,
but that wasn’t what it was.

I had developed a real distaste for the city
manager-council form of government. That
was because I had an opportunity to come to
know that entirely too many of the decisions
that were made as to how the city was and
should be functioning were being made in
the city manager’s office. Furthermore, the
city charter prohibits council members—the
mayor being one—from interfering in the
city manager’s work, which can make it very
difficult.

Later on, when Chris Cherches was city
manager, I had reason to believe that he gave
instructions to his department heads that they
were not to deal with me on this level, and that
I should be dealing directly with him. I felt that
I should be free to talk to anyone in the city hail
that I wished, so I challenged him. I went to
him and said, “I understand that you’ve told a
lot of your department heads that they are not
to deal with me. I want that order changed.”
He kind of hangdog denied having made it,
but shortly thereafter an order went out saying
that they were to deal with me, but he was to
be informed of everything that took place.

The earlier experience with Etchemendy
made me realize the power that city managers
have. For instance, we ran into a lot of serious
problems in the building department with
very questionable behavior on the part of a
lot of the city inspectors. If you prohibit a
member of the council or the mayor from
getting in there and asking these questions,
then all of a sudden one day you read about
it in the paper. The problem is not that the
public is angry with the head of the building
department or the city manager—they want
to know why the council didn’t know these
things. You don’t know, because they won’t

tell you. The person who serves as the city
manager is an unelected person with no duty
or responsibility to the public. He or she can
get away with those things an elected person
cannot—or should not—be allowed to.

I began to think that what I had always
considered a good system really was not a
good system. I believe that the person who
is going to hang by his or her heels and toes
out there where the public is concerned is the
one that ought to be making those decisions.
I have no problem with it being an entire
mayor-council sort of thing, but I did not
like this thing in the city charter that says that
you cannot interfere with the city manager.
That city manager should be taking orders
from the council. He is, in a sense, but the
council is not telling this person everything
that should be done. If you’re just able to deal
with a little dab—you tell him you want to
check an ordinance or something—well, he’ll
do those little things. But in the meanwhile
there are a hundred other things that are
being done in that same place that you know
nothing about. The city manager obviously
can’t make a report to the city council on
everything that’s done.

One of the goals in life of the city manager
is to keep climbing this ladder. They go into
one city and try to establish a reputation so
they can move on to the next. They don’t
have sufficient background in the history
of the city, and knowing where a city is at
in a particular time is not, in my opinion, a
sufficient commitment to the interests of the
city. So I have always felt that someone who
was appointed and who was not accountable
to the public should not be in the position of
wielding as much power as the city manager
does under our form of government. When
I made a public statement to that effect, the
newspaper picked up on it and was very
heavily supportive of the city-manager form

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

of government. They felt it took the kind of
city-of-Chicago-politics out of it and made it
more professional. There is some truth in that.

However, about that same time they
did a very flattering story on the mayor of
Baltimore, and how successful he had been in
doing wonderful things for the city. I found
it very ironic because he headed up a strong
mayor form of government and was able to
get things down. Of course, I responded to
the newspaper. I said that that was precisely
one of my points, because he had the power
to make things move like that; therefore, he
was really a more effective person to head up
the city government as city manager. But I also
knew that there was very little likelihood that
this would get passed by the council, because
I was still only one of seven with a vote.

I felt strongly about this issue, regardless
of whether or not it would happen in the
future—it was something we should seriously
think about at the very least, we ought
to change the city charter so that council
members would have more authority in
city government. One of the ways that I
felt that that could be accomplished was by
assigning a member of each council to a major
department. For instance, a member of the
council would be responsible for the police,
fire, building, or planning departments—that
sort of thing. Part of their job would be to
know everything that was going on there.
They in turn would keep the council fully
informed, knowing full well that they would
be responsible to the voting public for what
was going on. This arrangement could end a
situation which I saw arise many times when
someone would ask a question and I would
say, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the city
manager.” That’s embarrassing as well as
frustrating.

When running for office, council members
would understand that that was going to be

one of their functions as a council member.
If they were unwilling to fill that role, if they
didn’t have the time for it or the inclination,
obviously they should not be running for
office. The public, as well as other council
members, would have a right to expect that
of them.

When I proposed an increase in salary
for the mayor, I also proposed one for the
council members, who were making $9,000 at
that time. I recall making the statement that if
someone were hired to head up a business—
as I had been elected supposedly to head up
the City of Reno—and he agreed to work for
$10,000, the employer would not hire him.
They would feel that if that was all that person
was worth, they didn’t want him.

Most people operated under the
impression that it was not a full-time job.
It was a citizen form of government in
which you should not expect to be overly
compensated. But such a low salary limits the
kinds of people who can or who are willing
to run for office. You either have to have a
substantial income or outside savings so that
you don’t need that income as a part of your
everyday living expenses. It either has to be
that or elect someone who is retired and can
survive on their income. A bad alternative is
to hire a person who has a full-time job, and
consequently does not have the time to put
into his elected position

Sparks has now raised its salary for
its mayor, and so has Reno. The county
commission members are also considerably
better compensated. They’re a bit more
realistic now—like, the mayor is making
$18,000 now. That’s an 80 percent increase
over what it was. Pete Sferrazza, the present
mayor of Reno, has a law practice. I suppose
between the two jobs, he makes an adequate
living. But that’s not a judgment that I am
prepared to make, because I still think that if

Barbara Bennett

the people of the city want a full-time mayor,
then they’d better be willing to pay that
person’s salary In my opinion, the $18,000
would still have to be doubled in order to
make it right.

During my campaign, I had told the
public the things that I wanted to do, so when
I got in office there were no real surprises.
I wanted Reno to have its own Planning
Commission. We had a Regional Planning
Commission at the time, but everything
was breezing through them, just like it was
breezing through the Reno City Council. So I
felt that we had to have a gaming policy. I felt
that the public should have an opportunity to
be heard on the matter, and that their wishes
should be, to the very best of our ability,
respected in trying to develop a growth policy
in this community.

At that time Harrah’s wanted approval to
expand and add a tower. I knew that the kind
of expansion that Harrah’s was looking for was
precisely the thing that the public didn’t want
any more of at that time. And if the public had
had a chance to vote on it, it would have been
overwhelmingly defeated.

Early on in my mayoral term I got a lot of
heat from the hotel-casino industry, because
they really felt that I was on their backs. I
always recognized that economically they
were the major contributors to the tax base in
this state, and they provided so many jobs, so
it wasn’t that at all. I never hated the gaming,
and I don’t to this day. This state has made
a choice that this is where they want to be,
and I think the people are satisfied with that.
What they don’t want is to sacrifice what they
see as their quality of life in order to expand
that industry.

Early on the casino people really thought
that I was anti-casino, and it was difficult
to convince them that I wasn’t. Eventually,

though, I think that in that area of business in
the city, they began to trust me and to believe
what I was saying. I also developed a better
understanding of the problems that they had
to deal with. It became a sort of comfortable
relationship at least. But they never affected
my votes at the table, because I was still
opposed to a lot of expansion.

The development community was another
matter. Same areas of the business community
were on my back constantly, charging me with
being responsible for a no-growth attitude.
I’d been taking a lot of what I thought were
undeserved shots. But I have also realized
that these same interests are still making it
very difficult to get anything done in this
community.

There was a story in the paper that I had
actively dissuaded some desirable industries
from locating in this community, which
infuriated me because it was a flat-out lie. Bill
Myers, I believe, owned the largest real estate
company in town at that time. I was told by a
member of his staff that he said I had literally
turned away several businesses that were
interested in settling in Reno. I really hit the
ceiling when I heard it, because it was untrue.
Completely untrue. It apparently had come
out of a remark make by Ernie Martinelli,
who was a banker don in Las Vegas. I don’t
know whether he was in print or had made a
speech or what, but he apparently made the
claim that I had intentionally diverted several
businesses from coming into the state, which,
as I said, was just a gross he.

I called Bill Myers into the office to tell
him what I thought about it, and I challenged
him at that time to go public and name these
businesses that I had supposedly turned away.
He did nothing, but the rumors persisted. I
went to the press with it and told them what
had happened and challenged Martinelli
or Myers to come up with a list of these

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

businesses. But they wouldn’t say which
industries, because it was a lie.

In turn, I charged them with generating
exactly that climate, which they tried to
blame me for. They repeatedly made these
allegations about me, but they were in fact
telling an untruth to somebody out there who
wasn’t going to want to come into this area.
I was really furious. I said, “Either put up or
shut up, because this isn’t true.” That was the
last I heard of it from that particular group.
Those two were probably more minor players
in the efforts to get me out of city hall from
the day I arrived. But the charges were always
present.

As mayor, my main concern was the
growth issue and the multiple issues within
it, such as the availability of water, water
quality, air quality, and affordable housing.
Outside of growth, I felt that we needed a
far stronger ethics policy. I also felt that the
people of the city had to be brought more into
government participation—in other words,
citizen participation. I felt that we definitely
needed a broader-based level of boards and
commissions, because they had been so
heavily oriented in the direction of whatever
they were dealing with. There were very few
women, practically no minorities, so there
needed to be more balance put into that.

In a lot of areas, I enjoyed a degree of
success. One area was the Civil Service
Commission, which deals with the city and
with city employees. In the past, it appeared
to have been the attitude that businessmen
were the best equipped to understand those
problems. I felt that had to change, because
the city also had a problem with its affirmative
action hiring policies that eventually had to
be dealt with through a court order. The city
hired at least as many women as men, so I
made recommendations which put Bernice
Martin, a black woman who was a nurse, on

the Civil Service Commission. We also put
Carlos Romo, a man who was Hispanic and
had his doctoral degree, on the commission.
The city is full of people who are qualified
who are not only business people. I think
that was proved time and again in many of
the appointments that I recommended and
were approved by the council

But I had lots of other problems with the
council, particularly when it came to power on
boards and commissions, such as the Airport
Authority. There were battles over that. I
felt that it needed a citizen representative,
because the representatives were flyers or
owned their own airplanes or had that kind
of interest in things. I fought for it, but was
not able to accomplish that for a long time
until I ultimately had Jean Stoess appointed.
Jean, of course, was a very competent person,
and brought the citizen point of view to the
board at that time.

The group that always gave me fits,
that I was never able to deal with, was the
Planning Commission. Once we had a
planning commission, I simply was not able
to get anyone who felt as I did about growth
or who was even moderate about it. I really
wanted planning commission people to at
least be middle-of-the-roaders. The result
of the early Reno Planning Commission
was that they were just gung-ho on growth,
and they reflected the attitudes of the people
who appointed them from the council. That’s
exactly what it amounted to. Since I was the
only advocate of moderating growth, it was
always a six-to-one vote.

For instance, if you had people appointed
who were in the nursery business in a very
modest way, all of a sudden they got to be
huge nurseries. There were also architects
and other people in development. Then you
obviously had firms that built or repaired
streets, and engineering firms that worked

Barbara Bennett

with them. Those were the kinds of people
that were getting appointed to the planning
commission, with a few exceptions. I was
able to get a couple of people, but I was never
able to get a majority that really felt the need
to slow down growth and to say no to a lot
of developments that I believed were very
unwise.

The Planning Commission was just a
body that made recommendations; however, I
don’t know how many times I heard members
of the council say, “Well, I do not want to go
against the recommendation of the Planning
Commission.” They said, “We’ve appointed
this commission. If we don’t listen to them,
why have them?” All the while they have
the prerogative of appointing someone who
comes from the exact position that they do,
which is frustrating.

Frustrating is not a word that I especially
like to use publicly, but I did then, because
it was like being stuck between a rock and a
hard place. You knew what had to be done,
but you didn’t have the votes to get it done
and couldn’t sway anyone. No one on the
council moved in that first year with a few
exceptions. Janice Pine and Bill Wallace
occasionally opposed something, or at least
tried to alter something, but otherwise it
was just right down the line—’’we’re going to
approve everything.”

Of the people on city council, Bill Wallace
and Janice Pine always did their homework.
When Ed Oaks was on the council, Ed was
considered the financial expert. He had a very
lengthy banking background, so he could deal
with financial questions that came to the table.
But I doubt if Ed ever looked at his packet of
issues outside of the economic concerns. His
votes strongly echoed the fact that in Ed’s
mind, the economy took absolute first place
over all of the other concerns—whether it
was water, too much growth too fast, lack of

housing, or anything. He just simply came
from the philosophy that economics came
first.

As far as Bruno and Ed Spoon were
concerned, I don’t recall whether they
opposed anything, because it’s been over eight
years since I worked with them. I can’t say
absolutely that they never opposed anything,
because they may well have. But certainly the
overwhelming numbers of their votes—and
all the council votes, as a matter of fact—were
six to one. For instance, they were six to one
for expansion of Harrah’s; they were six to
one for approval of the Peppermill, though
it had not been approved initially; they also
approved the Gold Dust, which, thank God,
never got off the ground downtown. The
Gold Dust was an absolute mish-mash job,
where they’d taken old rooms and given them
approval for the 100 rooms needed to build
a casino in Reno. Ugh! With 500 rooms, the
Gold Dust at that time would have required
11 more police officers, another police car,
probably, and an additional $400,000 in
school costs. It would’ve created 70 more tons
of air pollutants in an area which was already
heavily polluted. It would’ve also increased the
population by 958 people, according to the
numbers that were given to me at the time.

The Florentine was another proposed
hotel-casino that they didn’t proceed with.
Economically they weren’t equipped to build
the thing.

Some of the casinos were low quality
places. For a while some people were talking
about Reno concentrating on having only
high quality casinos that would attract
wealthier people. Hut I don’t believe that that’s
a decision government should be involved
in. It’s responsibility is to make sure that
whatever project comes in can be supported
by resources in the area and is not going to be
a detriment in any way. Those are the things

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

government should deal with. If somebody
wants to build a place that is less than upbeat,
that decision is theirs.

In mid-1979 we began talking and hearing
about the MGM Grand expansion. It was a
very large expansion they wanted—almost
1,000 rooms, as I recall. MGM knew that
they were going to have trouble with this,
because the council was talking about the
sewer problem and how much it would
take to accommodate the expansion. The
Regional Planning Commission had put out
information dealing with the problems of air
quality in that area, and how many new traffic
trips a day they were expecting and so forth.
This was towards the end of October.

I questioned the wisdom of the MGM
expansion because of the limited water supply.
I didn’t want the community to be put in the
position of subsidizing future hotel-casino
growth through higher water rates, because
Sierra Pacific had come in just a few weeks
before this and said that we’d have a water
shortage in 1981 and 1982. Then all of a
sudden they came back and softened it. They
said the water supply was sufficient. But the
state water engineer’s office said at that time
that just the subdivisions and condos that
had already been approved exceeded Sierra
Pacific’s water availability at that time.

On top of its water requirements, the
MGM expansion would require 92,800 daily
gallons of sewer capacity. The city then had
only 60,000 gallons of capacity, if I remember
right. Then the MGM had some kind of a plan
where it was going to give up some fixtures in
the hotel to get the additional sewer capacity it
needed. Sewage capacity was really short then,
and we weren’t due to finish this expanded
sewer plan for about two more years. There
was an allocation plan, so that the city could
only allocate so much in a quarter. So the
MGM contributed half a million dollars to

the sewer collateral plan so that they would
be assured of the necessary sewage capacity.
The council was told by the city attorney that
he doubted that it was legal, but the council
went ahead and approved it, anyway.

When I was running for office, I had
spoken out against the sewer collateral plan.
I felt it was giving unfair advantage to a select
group of area developers at the expense of
other people, who would have to sit and wait
for sewage while the developers went ahead
and did all their building. Who would know
if any resources would be left by the time
they got through? At any rate, it ultimately
was found to be illegal by the attorney
general’s office. An opinion was rendered that
ultimately did away with it, which I thought
all along would be the case.

The MGM was looking at hiring 1,400
new people who were going to need housing
and places to shop. Based on all these facts,
the planning commission voted seven to two
against recommending expansion. Thank
goodness there was somebody at that time
wise enough to say, “Hey, we can’t handle
this now...” But then the council had already
approved an early start for Harrah’s. In other
words, they gave them approval to go ahead
before they knew the sewer capacity would
be available, and the same kind of a situation
then arose again in the MGM thing. We were
into what I considered a deficit spending of
water, and a deficit spending of sewer. If you
think deficit spending in the U.S. Government
is awful, when you start into deficit spending
where life-sustaining resources are concerned,
you’ve really got a problem.

In fact, the city of Sparks filed a lawsuit
against us in June of 1979 when I had been
at the council for a few weeks. They were
suing Reno over reckless allocation of sewer
capacity as it related to the hotel-casino early
starts. They were upset about it. Here we had

Barbara Bennett

another city entity that could recognize the
stupidity in this because they were dealing
with growth problems similar to ours, but the
city council was still ignoring them!

These things were pretty discouraging,
and this made me more firmly resolved to
keep on this path and to make them have to
deal with these votes next time they came up
for election. It made me absolutely convinced
that I would not hesitate to remind the public
of this when it was necessary That was the
only recourse I had to those actions to which
the majority of the people in this community
were opposed. Sometimes people would come
down to the meetings and back me up and
give support.

When the city council was discussing the
MGM Grands bid for expansion, I went to
talk with MGM’s chairman, Barry Brunette.
We hadn’t even exchanged a dozen words,
and Mr. Brunette said that they would be
willing to provide day care. I don’t think it
would have been free, but instead would have
been maybe low cost, based on the employee’s
ability to pay. MGM also agreed and did put
up $400,000 for low-cost housing.

When the day care issue came to the
Reno City Council, there was a lot of dispute
or argument over it. Apparently, many of the
area businesses saw this as a precedent-setting
step. I had a strong sense that these businesses
had been in touch with a number of the
council members, because all of a sudden at
the council table, we got this argument that
we shouldn’t be forcing businesses to do this
kind of thing. The interesting point about this
was that Reno was written up in a national
magazine at that time. It was an individual
publication about top firm people that deal
with child care. The article praised the city of
Reno for attempting to move in this direction.
Here we had MGM saying they’re willing

to do it, and the council wouldn’t approve
it. That did it in. This was the first council I
worked with, before Peter and Florence came
on, but the issue still exists today. We even
have Barbara Vucanovich, our conservative
Republican Congresswoman, talking in
terms of child care and admitting that there’s
a problem.

Businesses that provide child care across
the country have known for years that it
has been beneficial to them. They have less
absenteeism for which they have to pay-, they
have less employee turnover; they have fewer
problems all around. So it has not been a
major, costly item for them in doing business.
I think that with some foresight on the part
of the council, we could’ve had that start, but
it went down the tube.

One of the things that was very
troublesome to me was that prior to 1981,
the council almost automatically approved
extensions to building projects which were
sitting on the waiting list because there had
been a recession at the time. If they were not
building, it wasn’t because they didn’t have
approvals—they did, even though they kept
blaming me as though they didn’t, [laughs]
But the fact was that they didn’t want to build
because there was a recession during that
time. Costs were too much to build and so
they were coming in and getting approvals,
and leaving these things sit on the shelf until
they were ready to go. That was happening,
so we had this huge backlog of approved
projects.

Falcon’s Nest was the first real test... It was
like a 500-unit condo that now sits out in the
north end of town-that cement monstrosity.
About a month after I arrived at city hail,
Falcon’s Nest representatives came back to get
an extension, and I didn’t want to give it to
them. Janice Pine had voted against it in the

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

first place. At any rate, the owner threatened
to sue. If memory serves me right, he never
did. I can’t remember whether he was from
an outside area. I think he was, because a lot
of them built out in other areas, went as far
as they could, and then moved in here. When
they finished here, they’d move on someplace
else.

There was that problem on the South
Virginia strip cropping up more and more,
too, because there had been a lot of approvals
granted out there. Fortunately, many of them
to this day have not been built. That only
alludes to the problem I touched on earlier.
Here were all these projects that had been
approved, but you couldn’t guess that they
weren’t going to be followed through. You
can’t keep allocating waters that have already
been given to someone else. If a project is not
going to be completed, it should be taken off
the list and kicked loose. Then it should have
to be approved once again.

The county had approved a lot of big
projects out on the south end of town, and
there were a lot of other developments that
were going in—like, Harrah’s owned property
out there. They were talking about this huge
development out quite a ways. Then there was
another talk involving Hilton. But Harrah’s
owned property out there at that time. When
Meadowood and some of those buildings in
that area went in, a property on ideal corner
lots was all being saved for something, It
was always my opinion that if gaming was
permitted to go out there, that’s what it would
be used for: big casinos all the way out.

The community had been talking for a
long time about downtown redevelopment.
I know Moya Lear and I walked through
some of those areas one day trying to get a
sense of what could be done, what kind of
recommendations to make, and who wanted
committees to work on these different things.

It really did need upgrading, and still does. I
pushed for redevelopment in the downtown
area. I must say that the plan as it is evolving
now is not what I had in mind, but it is an
improvement and there should be more
to come. There were some of us who felt
that there ought to be more of a mall-type
appearance on Virginia Street. Businesses
themselves did not want that. I think that
there were those who were concerned about
how we would get taxi cabs and buses in and
out of there.

Some downtown redevelopment took
place before I left. The downtown interests
had to get their heads together and decide
what they were willing to settle on. It was
probably less elaborate than originally
planned; however, it’s turning out to be
more costly than the initial estimates were. I
know that we talked in terms of $30 million,
which was not going to come out of the
general budget in the city. It was going to
be paid for by a property tax collected from
the tax increment district in the downtown
area. This tax base was to be used to pay for
downtown redevelopment. Then Harrah’s
Auto Collection got into it, as did a very
active local group, headed up by Ben Dasher.
They put a lot of time and effort into saving
Harrah’s Auto Collection and putting it in
downtown Reno, which I agreed was a good
idea. I’m still not sure how the funding is
working because we’re still working on that.
We know it’s going. I don’t know whether it’s
going to look like the initial architectural and
landscaping plans that we saw. I don’t know
what’s going to happen, but it will be an asset
in downtown Reno.

We also looked at the possibility of
acquiring the post office on Mill and South
Virginia, which is no longer the main branch
in Reno. But the government wasn’t interested,
at least at that time, and I don’t suppose they

Barbara Bennett

are now. Of course, it’s a building that the
taxpayers paid for initially. They ought to just
give it back to the city. It is a nice building and
with the Mapes there, they could’ve had a lot
of nice shops and things done with it.

There were also plans to do things with the
river, and there still are. Of course, whatever is
done with the river in downtown Reno should
not interfere with the ability of the water to
flow through this community, because it’s a
source of drinking water and it is our lifeline.
Any plans with that river have to be very
carefully handled.

Some interesting things happen when
you walk door-to-door on your own behalf.
I’ll never forget one man who had a small
business of his own. We were talking about
growth in the area and he was talking about
politicians who were “on the take.” I said to
him, “Well, that is never going to happen
with me.”

He says, “Don’t give me that crap, lady.
When you get there you’re going to be like all
the rest of them.” [laughs] I never forgot that
man. He lived right over near us. I saw and
heard more of that attitude as I went along.
People go off and vote but they honestly
believe that everybody who is elected is going
to be a crook. They really do. I think that I
was able to dispel this. I think that it was one
of the greatest services that I provided to this
community during my term of office: I came
to be known as being honest, I could not be
bought, and I did not change my attitudes or
opinions.

Someone wrote in an editorial that I
softened my attitude about gaming after I took
office because I had come to understand how
the gaming community functions. There is
some truth in that—a little bit. I did come to
understand what their role in a community
is, and what I thought it ought to be. I also

thought that we were far more of a one-
industry state at that point in time, with all
our eggs in one basket. If gaming ever went
sour, and California or some other place
picked up on it, we could be faced with some
very serious problems. I also understood the
gaming industry’s limitations in its ability to
make money.

There are a lot of things that they still
do which I disapprove of wholeheartedly,
and I have never softened my attitude about
building hotel-casinos. Nor have I changed
my mind on the subject of expanding while
only having limited resources.

Bruno Menicucci, Marcel Durant and
Clyde Biglieri were running for re-election
to the city council at the time that I was
running for mayor. They all had very pro¬
growth voting records: they had approved
the MGM, the Florentine, the Peppermill, the
Sundowner, the Eldorado, the Sands, Circus
Circus, Harold’s, and Harrah’s addition. Some
of these recommendations had been made
against the approval of the Regional Planning
Commission.

The Regional Planning Commission
was comprised of people from all three
local government entities: Washoe County,
Sparks, and the city of Reno, with each entity
appointing one or two people —I’ve forgotten
the precise number—to this board. At any
rate, at that time it was not a body that was
controlled entirely by the majority of Reno
City Council members as the Reno City
Planning Commission eventually became.

I appointed myself to the Planning
Commission right after I was elected. They
had a planning staff, which was beginning
to formulate a lot of reasonable questions
about traffic congestion, air quality, and
about the resources in the community and
how they should be allocated. That was an

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

attitude that never really gained acceptance
at the Reno council table. I don’t know how
they expected planning to take place without
knowing, for instance, how much water you
had, or how much of that you wanted to
allocate to economic diversification. They
also didn’t discuss how much water it would
take to provide new homes and the related
businesses that would move into a community
as a result. There would be new businesses
like barber shops, grocery stores, shopping
centers—all of these things that come in,
creating a humongous need for water, as the
kids would say.

The water question has been kicking
around for years and years and years, and I
finally reached the conclusion that the people
who wield power and who had great interest
in developing this community were only
going to be satisfied with the kind of water
numbers that they could generate themselves.
For instance, if I’m running a business and I
hire someone to do a study for me, and if that
person comes back with a highly negative
study, chances are I’m not going to listen to
him. I’m going to find somebody who is going
to tell me what I want to hear. I reached the
conclusion that that was taking place.

I think that in a way, those who were
already on the council—like Bruno, Spoon,
Ed Oaks and Bill Granata—already had a
mindset before I ever arrived at city hall. I
think that the people who wielded influence—
particularly those with an economic interest
in growth in the city of Reno—were already
certain of where they stood. So once I arrived,
I don’t feel they had to influence them any
more at all. I think then the job was to get
the new council members into their corner.

Ed Oaks passed away when he was on
the city council and we had to approve a new
member. As I recall, there were about 26

serious applications that we’d gone through
as people applied for the post. When it came
time to make an appointment, I nominated
Barbara Weinberg, who’s very bright. She
was a Republican, but I didn’t care, because
I knew she could do the job. Besides, it was
a non-partisan office. Bill Wallace, I think,
nominated Jim Thornton, and Janice Pine
nominated John Francis, who was a banker.
She was interested in him because Oaks had
been a banker, if my memory serves me, and
she felt that another man of that caliber would
be useful in that position.

We were unable to really move off base,
because everybody was staying only with their
own nominees. We went through three votes,
I think, and Janice dropped her nomination
of Francis and moved over and supported
Jim Thornton. Jim didn’t have enough votes,
because he still had just Bill and Janice. I was
the only one supporting Barbara, so nobody
had four votes. Then Stan Greene’s name
somehow got in acre—I think Ed Spoon
nominated him. Stan Greene was the manager
of the Old Town Mall on South Virginia at
the time. His name all of a sudden popped
up with support from Spoon, Menicucci,
and McClelland. There were only six of us,
so that would have been the three. He wound
up with three votes and Francis was gone so
then we had three votes for Greene, two for
Jim Thornton, and one for Barbara. I knew I
wasn’t going to pick up any votes for her.

Everyone had been interviewed by
the council in personnel sessions. I don’t
remember whether they were open sessions,
but I guess under the law they had to be. I had
never even considered Greene, and I had to
delay the vote to find out more about him. I
did know that he was serving on the Citizen
Policy Planning Advisory Committee, which
was really a citizen’s group that I had had good
faith in. They did have a lot of social concerns

Barbara Bennett

and were making what I thought were good
recommendations. That was all I knew or was
able to find out about Stan Greene. But since
I knew where the other two were, I switched
my vote and made the fourth vote for Stan
Greene.

Once that vote was cast, I saw a number
of developers in the audience stand up and
practically cheer, and they were patting each
other on the back. I got suckered. Bill Wallace
had changed his vote, too. He and I must
have come to the same recognition about the
same time, because he came into my office
later on and he was mad at himself; and I
was furious with myself. I felt we’d really been
suckered, and we were, believe me! The thing
that made me so angry with myself is that the
people who had been supporting Greene—
McClelland, Spoon and Menicucci—were
the people that were voting in the opposite
direction from me on everything. So I should
have suspected something. It make me so mad
that I was so dumb that I didn’t get it, and Bill
felt the same way...oh, boy!

There was a time when Ed Spoon had
made comments about my leadership ability.
He had never wanted me there and I beat him
for mayor, so obviously he didn’t have kind
feelings toward me. He said it was the mayors
job to be more communicative and cohesive
with the council. My attitude was that I wasn’t
there to be more cohesive with the council,
with which I had very little in common where
the future of the city was concerned. I saw
my charge to be true to the things that I had
advocated when I ran for office, and to the
mandate that the voters had given me. When
you have that kind of a schism, it is very hard
to find much which you can agree upon.

Janice Pine and some of the members of the
council were quoted in a newspaper article as
saying they were concerned that I was getting

prior commitments on votes from Florence
Lehners and Peter Sferrazza. They obviously
concluded that I wouldn’t have supported
them if I didn’t think they were going to be
there when I needed them for a vote. I was so
surprised at this, because I really never traded
votes—never a single vote, Essentially that kind
of an attitude makes me a very poor politician
in the eyes of the people. Quid pro quo is how
the system works, and I have never been able
to deal with making a trade.

In the first place, if you were inclined to
that sort of thing, you would only be making
trades for important things. If someone
wanted my vote on something that was
important to them, they’re not going to settle
in return for some little pee-diddling item.
They would want my vote on something. But
I couldn’t see operating this way, because
these things were all so tied together. I could
not give up my attitude about water or, for
instance, a two percent rate of growth that was
not to be compounded annually in exchange
for a vote to keep out a Gold Dust! Besides, I
shouldn’t have to trade off something else—I
don’t care what it is. I understand that’s how
politics works, but I just cannot deal with it.
Having really come to grips with that, I know
I will never run for office because it does
inhibit your effectiveness. In my opinion,
vote-trading is unethical. Despite what some
of the people on the council thought about
this vote-trading thing, it was not going on.
None of them approached me about it. If they
had, I would have made it clear that it wasn’t.

I started work on an ethics law in 1980.
Common Cause, a national organization,
has always been a major leader in honest
government I was a member of Common
Cause off and on, but I don’t think I was right
at that time. They had facilities available to
provide information on ordinances that had
been passed in other communities. I told

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

them that I wanted samples of good ethics
codes in those communities where they had
been challenged by law. We weren’t going
to put anything in writing that could be
overturned because it was illegal. At any rate,
it took them a while to compile. There were
ordinances from the East Coast and from
Arizona. I had about a good half-dozen, very
comprehensive, court-tested ethics laws.

We had an ethics law in the state of
Nevada, but it was really nothing. I don’t know
when it was passed, but I would imagine it had
been on the books for ages. To this day, they
try to make changes down at the legislature
in ethics legislation, and it’s difficult to get
those people who have to live under the law
to accept anything tougher than what’s already
on the books. Politicians are great about
discussing ethics, so long as they don’t have
to adhere to them.

Louis Test was the city attorney at that
time, and I really didn’t want to have to draft
this thing myself because I wanted to make
sure it was all right. I did study law, and I think
I had a good sense of what we wanted to do
legally in Reno that had been tested elsewhere.
I knew what I wanted in an ethics code that I
considered critical to any ethics code. When
I got all these papers together. I made a rough
draft of what I wanted and asked the attorney
to draft an initial ordinance, which is the route
I suppose one is expected to go through in
order to get something like that accomplished.
Several months later I got this copy out of the
city attorney’s office. He had assigned it to an
assistant district attorney, and in my opinion,
it was absolute garbage. It was barely an iota
tougher than the existing state law. If we were
going to go with something like that, we didn’t
need to do it at city hall-we already had that.
I just gave up in despair and decided to draft
it myself. That took a lot of time putting it
together.

After I came up with a draft, Louis Test
didn’t say anything. Louis was an elected
official and he didn’t have to do anything that
he didn’t want to do. It wouldn’t have done me
any good to say. “Louis, I don’t like this. Write
a tougher ordinance.” It may have been that
he really felt the draft was too tough, or that
he didn’t want to antagonize the votes which
he could still count on in city council. But
whatever his reasons, he was never unpleasant
about it.

In May of 1982, this thing had already
been in the works for about a year. At that
time, it went into the hands of the council,
at which time they decided they had to have
some workshops with it. I gave them the draft
to read prior to the time that we went to any
work sessions or meetings so that they would
know what it was all about.

After the draft was reviewed, I immediately
ran into some major objections, mostly from
Janice Pine and Jim Thornton. Janice Pine,
for instance, said she felt the state law was
adequate. And it wasn’t. I think she objected
mostly because of the gifts and trusts that were
involved. Thornton’s problems also had to
deal with the trusts and the fact that he didn’t
think that morality could be legislated. But I
think they had trust interests and didn’t want
to have to disclose them. That’s an argument
that comes up all the time when it comes to
an ethics law. But the fact is that they didn’t
like the idea that, for instance, members of
the family also had to file financial statements,
and this true of every good ethics law in the
country. It’s so obvious why.

Some of that went on in this city: if you
had a little something not quite as neat as you
would want the public to know about it, you
put it in somebody’s name in the family. I had
a hard time getting disclosure accepted, and
I had a time with the trusts. One of Janice’s
explanations for not wanting to provide

Barbara Bennett

information on family members’ finances was
that she thought it would make her children
targets for kidnapping and blackmail. I never
could understand that reasoning.

Janices lack of support on the bill as it was
initially presented did not come as a surprise
to me, because I was aware of the kinds of
interests she had. I knew where a lot of her
money in the election had come from. If you
know these things, you know the people who
get money from all of these interests don’t like
having to report, because someone has said
to them, “Hey, I’ll give you some money, but
I don’t want my name...” That’s what’s wrong
with the money situation in government,
and certainly was not just at the Reno City
Council table. It’s been in government across
the board.

The ethics law that did come out said that
candidates seeking municipal office in Reno
would have to disclose the source of every
campaign contribution. That’s what ultimately
came out. My initial presentation of this code
had required that everything over $50 be
disclosed. Jim Thornton got a little pushed
with this and said, “Well, if we’re going to do
it for $50, let’s make them require everything.”

I said, “That’s fine with me.”

Then he took another tack and said,
“All right, if we do that, then we ought to
include volunteers’.’ In other words if a person
volunteered to walk, man a telephone, or
something else, you would show that as a
contribution. I think that he hoped that that
would turn me away from the whole thing.

While I thought it was pretty ridiculous, I
said, “All right, if that’s the only way I can get
it, we’ll do it that way.” I really had a struggle
trying to get this deal.

I had to make some concessions that I
really didn’t like to make, either. For instance,
gifts only had to be disclosed if they came

from the immediate Reno area. That’s
ridiculous. One example—and this is only
an example—of what might happen, is this:
somebody here on the Reno council deals
with the business interest in some roundabout
way, and this person in Reno says, “Well, I
can’t do anything for you here in Reno because
it’ll be on the books, but I’ve got a great piece
of property up at the lake that’s yours for half
price.” Those are the way these things take
place and, in my opinion, the public is entitled
to know. I believe that very strongly.

Now we’re going through a big hassle back
in Washington with these very kinds of things.
The public’s right to know takes preference
over a candidate’s or an incumbent’s right
to privacy. Anyone that feels that they must
have that much privacy with their financial
doings ought not to be running for or sitting
in a public office. If they don’t want the public
to know, then don’t run. Of course they
say, “Well, it discourages good people from
running.” It does not discourage good, honest
people from running at all.

Another thing that the ethics law did was
to prohibit local public officials from acting on
matters in which they had a direct financial
interest. The state law deals with that in a little
better manner now, too, incidentally. At any
time when you had a financial interest, all you
had to do was just disclose the fact that you
had it, and then you could go ahead and vote.
I will say, however, that I don’t remember that
happening—anyone disclosing something
and then voting on it anyway.

The ethics law did pass, except Jim
Thornton voted against it and the Associated
General Contractors were against it, too. The
AGC was a major contributor to campaigns,
and the newspaper publishes where these
contributions come from. If the public is not
as aware or up to date on these facts, then they

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

can find out at that time. They know that the
AGC pours some of the money into—and this
is just an example, again—into a Thornton, or
into a Menicucci, or into a Spoon...they know
who is putting money into those candidates.
I don’t care whether it’s to local, county, state,
or even federal people—they say, “That does
not buy anything.” That is the biggest bunch of
garbage, because we know it buys something;
we know it does! All you have to do is take
a look at the voting records in Washington:
the PACs [Political Action Committees] are
pouring monies in there by the tons, and
you go see if anybody who accepted money
from them voted against what they wanted.
If you or anyone in your family has any kind
of financial interest, you cannot vote on this
thing—that’s the way it should be.

I think that getting the ethics law passed
was important, I really do. I think getting
planning into the city of Reno forced the
public, businesses, and everyone in this
community to look at planning not as
something evil, but as something beneficial
to everyone if done properly. Progress has
been made with planning, but there are still
so many weak areas that I almost despair at
times. It seems as though we’ll never bring
all the pieces together. We need to look at
projects not in and of themselves, but in a
cumulative way.

There are many cities that have passed
tough planning ordinances. The one in
Petaluma, California, was taken all the way
to the Supreme Court, because they were
putting major restrictions on growth. But
one of the problems with an ordinance is
that it can be changed, and Reno’s has been
changed. Some of the changes were good, and
some were not. If I were to get involved in this
thing now—which I can’t, because of personal
reasons—I would not attempt to accomplish

things through an ordinance at city hall or the
state. I would go to an initiative petition, and
force it that way.

In January, 1981, I had triple-bypass
surgery, but I wasn’t off work that long.
Everything went very well. I’ve always been a
hard charger, and I worked the mayor’s job in
the same way, so it wasn’t any stress of the job
that did it. Rather, it was an accumulation of
a lot of things. I had had a heart attack years
before. They weren’t sure if I had another heart
attack and they didn’t want to wait to find
out. They took me in for the tests right away,
and when they found that my arteries were
all plugged up, they wanted me in surgery as
soon as possible. Nine days later I was ready to
go back to work. I really felt fine. My surgeon,
Dr. Lurie, said to me, “There isn’t any patient
of mine going back to work in nine days.”

I said, “Why not? I feel fine.”

I think it was the next week that I went
back, and I felt great. I’ve had no more
problems to this day.

In 1981, Pete Sferrazza and Florence
Lehners were elected to the city council. I think
they were elected because the community
felt I needed support and help in getting
my programs adopted. Peter was known
because he had run before. His positions on
growth, along with those of Florence, were
very compatible with mine. Peter replaced
Stan Greene, I think, and Florence replaced
Bill Wallace.

Florence was really an absolute political
unknown in the area, because she had never
been involved in city government. It was all
new to her, so it was difficult—perhaps more
difficult for her than it might have been for
some others. But she worked very hard at it. I
did not find her difficult to work with. There

Barbara Bennett

is a learning process that anyone who goes to
city hall has to go through.

Spoon didn’t run, and Jim Thornton came
in in his district. Jim Thornton was the choice
of Bill Wallace and Pine. He beat Merle Snider.
They were the two top vote-getters in the
primary, but Thornton beat Snider in the run¬
off. Snider had connections with a union, and
I’m not sure how well he could have withstood
pressures from the construction industries to
support things if he had been elected.

Jim Thornton was a former president of
the Associated General Contractors and had
been a paving contractor, although I think he
had sold his business or was in the process of
selling it about that time. But to me, when I
hear AGC, Associated General Contractors,
this is the group I had been trying to deal with
all the time I had been at city hall—and very
unsuccessfully, I might add. At any rate, I liked
Jim Thornton as a person, because he came in
and talked with me. He said, as so many others
did, “We have more in common than you
think.” But we didn’t, and that also was borne
out in later days, because I simply could not
see how someone from Jim’s background could
believe in the same things I did where growth
management and control were concerned in
the city. We were worlds apart, and Jim also
had a terrible temper. He would really get
furious at the council table...that’s just where
he came down. But he was an honest man.

Snider was a union man—he was a
musician. I’ve always been a strong supporter
of unions because of this working background
of mine. I knew how important the evolution
of unions had been in benefitting working men
and women—how the working conditions
had improved, how wages had improved—so
it was very difficult for me to be outspoken
against the construction trades. But the
construction trades were closely allied with
the Associated General Contractors and

the development interests because they saw
that as their job. My attitude was, “Well, I
understand this, but don’t you understand
that if all this growth continues, you’re going
to work yourself out of a job? Then what do
you do—do you leave the community?” It
would have been in their best interests, in my
opinion, for the construction trade unions to
support planned growth so that they would
know that they would have a job five years
down the road. But instead, they accepted
this attitude: “We’ll take everything we can
get as far as we can get it.” That meant they
would wind up having to bring all of these
construction workers in from out of town
and burn up the jobs that the locals should be
working in. But I was never able to convince
them of that. At any rate, I did endorse Merle
Snider over Jim Thornton in that election, and
did not regret it.

I think we all agreed that we had serious
problems in the community. We’d talked
about the water; we’d talked about air quality,
we’d talked about the cost of living; we’d talked
about transportation, streets, smog—all the
things which are still besetting us. I was trying
to develop some kind of a consensus, and after
talking with Dick Scott, I kind of felt that we
could at least work together on some of these
things. His employment with Boomtown was
outside of Reno in Washoe County. I just
felt that I probably wouldn’t always have his
support, but there might be some times when I
could get some help from him. His opponent,
Millick, was not running an active campaign
and was a total unknown. Scott obviously had
a lot of political support from his service on
the Washoe County Commission, and I felt
he was going to be elected. I felt that the only
thing to do was to endorse him and see if the
endorsement would help get him in my corner
on a few things.

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

I never knew where Dick Scott was going
to come from. I felt that I really needed his
support and help on that council, so when he
first arrived at city hail, I made it a point to call
out to Boomtown and set up an appointment
to meet with him. I wanted to feel him out
and talk to him about some of the things
that Id like to do. I did it that way rather than
asking him to come into my office so that I
wouldn’t sound like a power-happy mayor. I
intentionally went out there to see him, and
he decided to keep me waiting, which put
me in kind of a foul mood. We really didn’t
reach any kind of consensus on where he was
going to go, but I never knew from one time
to another where he was going to end up.

Dick was a disappointment to me. I
think I got about what I expected from
the other people I served with. But I really
expected more of Dick. He had served as
county commission chairman, and I felt his
background would be helpful in ways. But
Dick never showed any real interest in the
city council, and I’m not sure why. However,
after all, he was president of Boomtown at
that time, which I’m sure was demanding a
lot of his time. Maybe he was discouraged to
“just” be a member of the city council, rather
than being in a governing role or in a position
of any high authority. I don’t know. He may
have been caught between two factions, which
is another possibility. He may have felt that
maybe he would have liked to have helped me
with some of the things that I needed help on,
but he also didn’t want to alienate the other
side over here. That could have been a part
of his problem.

But my main problem with Dick Scott
was that he showed up at council meetings
absolutely unprepared to deal with things.
I think we all had a sense that Dick barely
opened his city council packages, which,
incidentally, very often ran six inches in depth.

So maybe he didn’t have a chance to do it or
maybe he felt he was familiar enough with the
material. I don’t know. He was not a difficult
guy to work with—he’s very personable.

I felt that I was personally more effective
with this council than with its predecessor,
although I don’t make close personal
relationships. I honestly never had a dose
relationship with Florence, Pete, or any of
them, because that’s not my way. I have friends
that were personal friends from the time I
went to school, and I make life-long friends.
But I do not make friends easily. I never was
comfortable just being a glad-hander, which is
another political liability. Really, it is. I found
it very easy to be nice around people, and
to be comfortable with them, but I was not
interested in forming those kinds of personal
relationships.

During the second part of my city council
term, I know people got mad at me. Jim
Thornton would really get mad at me, and
Dick Scott and Janice Pine at times, too...
all of them. But it never amounted to the
kind of real vicious antagonism that existed
with that first group on the city council. We
accomplished a lot with the new group—we
made the first steps. For instance, once the
planning commission got going and our
planning department was functioning, we got
a profile that really had a lot of data. It took a
long time to compile.

Robert Hunter was the head of the
planning department, and he had just a
staff of two, if memory serves me right. The
department had been created by ordinance.
It was created just before the first council
went out back in April of 1981. The fact that
we finally got this profile out during my
administration was all right.

Robert Hunter was in a very unenviable
position in compiling the profile, because he

Barbara Bennett

was in the position of creating a document to
try to please a council that he knew was split
philosophically. His job, in my opinion, was
to present the facts, and wed deal with the rest
of it. I did feel that he could count votes, too,
just like everybody else. I did not see the kind
of hard-hitting document that I wanted to see,
which is not to say that everybody else was
wrong. Maybe that was all we should have had
at that time. I really wanted this document to
recommend less than a three or three-and-a-
half percent rate of growth annually. In the
end the profile got through, but I never got
the limitations that I wanted, though I didn’t
expect to get them all.

We had been going to public hearings,
too, and getting input from there. There are
two kinds of neighborhood meetings. I had
neighborhood meetings when I ran for office,
and I continued to have them after I was elected
But the kind of neighborhood meetings I’m
talking about are community meetings. I
wanted to have community meetings in a big
facility, and some of the council agreed. We
had all the community meetings in places
that could hold 400 or 500 people, so that the
people would have an opportunity to say how
they wanted their city to grow. Of course, in
addition to hearing from the general public,
there was a well-orchestrated appearance by
the development community at every single
meeting. So they’ve got their right to appear,
too. Those developers were smart. They
would never send the same people to every
meeting. For instance, you would see officers
from the Associated General Contractors at
city hall representing general development
interests. You would see the developer, and the
contractor, who had an interest in a specific
project, would be there. They would bring in
people from the construction industry, too.
Another time there’d be an engineer or an
architect. There would be a different person

from the Homebuilders or the Associated
Vendors.... They’re not fools.

The developers knew how to orchestrate
these kinds of things, and they were very
powerful. Where their own interests were
concerned, they were very well informed and
able to hire very good minds to perpetuate
their attitudes and opinions. But fortunately,
we must’ve outnumbered them some of the
times, like forty or fifty to one. So the public
was very supportive, which gave me a shot
in the arm, because I thought, “OK. What
I’m hearing from the public is that they are
essentially in agreement with me.” Not in
everything, though, because I never expected
everybody to agree with me on everything.
But essentially they supported the direction
that I saw. That’s what they were saying “Give
us direction. Control the growth. Don’t spend
resources we don’t have. Plan for what’s going
in this community. Don’t go through water
shortages.” I guess that’s why I’d been elected,
because I felt the majority in the public and I
were attuned to begin with. I hadn’t changed
and they hadn’t changed, and that really
rubbed a lot of the council members. They
felt that I used it to my advantage...of course
I used it, because that’s what I was there for. I
was there to represent the city and the people
in it, not special interests of any kind.

We didn’t really advertise the meetings-I
don’t recall that we gave them a title or
anything official. They were held maybe once
a month at the different schools, so they would
be easy to attend by the local people. At each
one of the meetings, a different member of
the council was the chair.

The first meeting that we held was in the
northwest, and for a first meeting there was
a very good turnout. The next one was at the
university, which took in all of that area over
there. That was a very large meeting. The next
largest one was in southwest I can’t remember

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

the name of the school, but it was absolutely
packed. There was standing room only, and
people were out the doors. It really surprised
me, because that’s a well-to-do area, and it also
houses so many of the business interests. It
was obvious that there was a schism between
the well-to-do people in the southwest as to
how they wanted their community to grow. I
always felt that they had the most to lose. They,
apparently, felt the same way, especially when
they were putting tens of thousands of dollars
into building a home and situating in an area
where they don’t want to be encroached upon
by development.

There was a smaller turnout at the Pine
School in the southeast, and not too great a
turnout over there in the northeast. I think
that was our last meeting. I walked out of
the meeting that was held at Pine Middle
School because I had heard the same story
over and over and over from the developers.
I’d gotten so sick of it that I finally just got up
and walked out. The developers said they were
offended, but I’m sure they weren’t. They were
probably glad to get rid of me. But they had
an opportunity to make an issue of it and they
did, so I bad to admit that it had been rude
for me to walk out. And I did say that. I said,
“My mind hasn’t changed a bit. I’ve heard it
all before and I’m really tired of hearing it, but
it was rude of me to walk out.” So I wound
up apologizing, but it didn’t seem to hurt me
politically at all.

The southeast was not what it is now,
because that’s all been put in new out there.
It’s practically a whole city in itself for being
a no-growth community.... Because it has
expanded a lot, the people out there have a
stake in what’s going on. I think as a result,
they’ve become more active politically in the
community, too. But I couldn’t say what the
attitude of the people in the community is
today, because we have too many new people.

I have no political sense of where they come
from and what brought them here. Plus, we’ve
always had so many transient people.

Bill Eadington at the university was
quoted in the paper around 1986 as saying:
“...local government may have to devise a
method for pushing back the costs of growth
so that those who generate it”—in this case the
gaming industry-”pay for it.” Now once again
we have a council that is trying to impose fees
on new growth. They’re having the same battle
that’s been going on for years and years by the
development community, which is trying to
head it off, to stop it. They don’t want to pay
these things, but we know that somebody has
to. In my opinion, it’s unfair to expect the
people that have been here for years, and
who have contributed to the economy of
this community, to pick up the new costs of
growth—which they have dearly indicated
they don’t want.

In 1981 and 1982 we wanted the housing
community to build some low-to-moderate-
cost housing, and they said they couldn’t
make enough profit at it. My attitude then
was that you can’t impose this kind of impact
fees on the builders, because they’re going to
pass it on to the person that buys the home.
But is that any more fair than passing it on to
somebody else who was already here? Because
that’s what they’re suggesting the alternative
should be.

When I was mayor, I talked a great
deal about economic diversification. I have
never pretended to be the first one that did,
because they had WIN [Western Industrial
Nevada], and we did have a rather substantial
warehousing industry. But even that was not
generating a lot of the kinds of paying jobs
that would permit people to cope with the
accelerating cost of living in the city of Reno.

Barbara Bennett

I think the city of Sparks has been more
responsible in dealing with its problems
than Reno has. They had some pretty good
planning measures, and they were also
diversifying—perhaps it was not necessarily
because they were so wise, but because
most of the warehousing industry lies out in
that end of the community Sparks was in a
position that if no more hotel-casinos were
built, their economy was pretty safe.

The city of Reno has been so heavily
dependent upon the gaming and hotel
industries that it was really very foolish. I
think that Sparks did a lot of wise things long
before we were able to convince anybody in
Reno to do them. Reno could certainly expand
its warehousing industry. But there were a lot
of industries that people were not seeking to
upgrade—bookbinding, for one thing, and
also research in association with the university.
Here we have a university town, and we didn’t
really have any industry that could or was
interested in taking advantage of it.

In conjunction with the University of
Nevada, WIN did a study about attracting
new industry to Reno. They made some very
solid recommendations, and even went to
businesses to poll them on how they felt about
moving to Reno and what the problems were.
One of the most persistent answers that we
got was the power of the gaming community.
Many people didn’t feel that their businesses
would be very important in a community
like ours. Some very good recommendations
and support came out of that study and
subsequent meetings. It has helped because
there are some groups that now work very
seriously on diversifying our economy. WIN
is one of them, and there’s also the Economic
Development Authority of Western Nevada
[EDAWN] EDAWN works very hard bringing
in new kinds of development. Kevin Day, who
was a bank officer, was the head of EDAWN.

There was a trip to Switzerland in
November, 1981, that was put together by a
group of business people that I was working
with. With the exception of $1,300, the
business community paid for the whole trip.
We considered the trip to be fairly successful.
I don’t know how wise it was, except that we
could attract some foreign investment money
into the area. There was a lot of that taking
place at that time. It was their impression
that it might help to get us on the road to
diversification. Bob Pearce was involved with
WIN, but I don’t know what he was doing at
that time. Vein Meiser was also interested
in what was going on at that time. He is in
warehousing. He had a lot of warehouses.
Hans Wolfe, a vice president of First Interstate
Bank, also went on the trip. It seemed when
we needed an interpreter, Hans wasn’t always
there, so the language barriers were a bit of
a problem.

There was nothing earthshaking that
happened over there. We talked with people
from Austria and Germany, of course, and
a lot of French and Swiss people. I guess
Kevin Day traveled to Europe frequently,
and most of those’ people did speak English,
anyway. They expressed a lot of interest and
asked questions about Nevada. They were
very interested in the fact that we have no
corporate tax, no state income tax, and that
we are a freeport state.

I had high hopes that economic
diversification would accelerate, and it did.
Hotel-casino development has slowed now—
there’s no question about it. But it has slowed
more out of their own need to slow it down
than it has in an effort to accommodate the
community’s wishes. We have just seen the
Peppermill get a large expansion. It’s possible
that some of these things that have been
pending for years have been approved now.

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

There has also been another casino approved
out near the airport.... Heaven help us if a plan
ever goes down in that area. I happen to think
it’s too dose to the airport for safety, and I
also think it shouldn’t be that near Wooster
High School. Plus, the traffic problems in that
end of town do not lend themselves well to
another hotel-casino out there.

I don’t have negative thoughts about the
gaming industry. It plays too important a role
in the economy of this state to put it down.
Given our location and how we grew, I don’t
think that we would ever be in a position to
even go after other kinds of industry if we
didn’t at least have the solid base here. So I
don’t have any problems with the gaming
industry per se. But I do not believe it should
be allowed to expand at will. The demanding
taxes on the casino industry have never been
overwhelming. Even today I think it’s five and
three-quarters percent at the state level.

I have never wanted to see Reno in the
position of Las Vegas, where there is gaming
in every single direction, scattered all over.
That’s always been a major concern of mine.
Early on in my administration I said—and
have said repeatedly—that to be healthy, every
city has to have a healthy downtown core. Our
downtown core happens to be hotel-casinos.
That being the case, then we want it to be
presentable and successful, because if you
destroy downtown Reno, I don’t know where
you’re going to go from there.

One of the alternatives is to scatter gaming
all over the city, and it’s showing unfortunate
signs of moving south. We used to have a
red line policy, but it has been gone for some
time. My attitude is that that red line should
not just encompass just half a dozen square
city blocks. As part of the studies that have
been done, the downtown core area is looked
at now as going from city hall along the river
clear to Keystone and includes the few blocks

the other side of the river down to the freeway.
So there is a vast area there for putting in
gaming hotel-casinos.

The reason for the hotel-casinos moving
out is that land is cheaper out there, period,
If they want to buy land downtown, it’s
expensive. But if you want to go into the
gaming business you ought to be willing
to buy expensive land. Then we have the
Mapes, an historic building, which is empty. I
happen to believe that the Mapes is a beautiful
building. I think it’s ideally suited for being
renovated. If you want a hotel-casino, why go
out and build one clear out on South Virginia
Street when we’ve got that one right there
where people can walk to it in the downtown
area? Then there is also the Riverside, which is
being purchased by the county so that county
offices can be put in it.

Reno was facing some difficulties during
this period of time in 1981. Sixty-five
city employee positions had been cut due
to Proposition 6. [Proposition 6 put a
constitutional cap on property taxes, reducing
revenues returned to municipalities between
1978 and 1980. [Ed.] As far as that was
concerned, I was considered to be someone
that was very much in tune with the public,
but Proposition 6 was an area in which I
disagreed with the majority of the public. The
public today still does not want tax increases.
They felt at that time that taxes were too high.
They probably were, because they’d gone
way up, but Proposition 6, in my opinion,
would have placed a really disproportionate
share of the tax burden on the homeowner.
Back then, the reassessment of all of the
downtown gaming property had not been
done since 1972.1 guess we had lost millions
of dollars because of the failure to reassess
down there. If that had gone through, their
tax rates downtown would’ve been frozen

Barbara Bennett

in position, which meant that that revenue
would be gone forever, so Proposition 6 was
really troublesome. I thought that there had
to be better ways of controlling government
expenses, and that gets back to the growth
problems of the time.

As I’ve said before, it takes a minimum
of 18 months for growth to catch up with
itself. When there is rapid growth, streets
have to be caught up, and at that time it cost
about a million dollars a mile to put in a road.
Obviously, it also costs a lot of money to buy
land to build schools. In one instance when
the Gold Dust downtown came in, I was
still trying to push for revenue analysis with
new projects that were being developed so
that we could look at them on a cumulative
basis. I wanted to look at what was already
approved, and add the costs and the water and
everything together so that we would have an
ongoing cumulative cost—we never got one,
incidentally. They’ve gone back to that now
and are beginning to get some cumulative
figures.

When you stop and look at the overall
picture, it’s really kind of frightening.
Proposition 6 was not the panacea that
people believed. Ultimately, we reached the
point where we just had to go to the voters
for support for the fire department, the police
department, and the city’s budget. The city
couldn’t pay for those kinds of life-saving
services in the community that are absolutely
essential.

It has always been my contention that if
the costs of new growth had been attached at
the time that these projects were approved, it
would’ve discouraged some of them. Those
that it did not discourage would have had
to agree to pick up those costs. Now, here
we are again, talking about imposing these
costs upon developers, and developers are
fighting it like crazy—nobody still knows

how to deal with the needs that come up in
the community. I mean, do we go for more
school bonds, which we’ve already had?
Do we use bonds to go out and bring water
into the community to support more sewer
expansion? No.

I thought that those new costs had to
come from someplace else, thereby relieving
taxpayers of an increasing burden. That
would’ve been the way to go, because now
the legislature has placed caps on local
government because they decided in their
wisdom that city governments had a lot
of waste...I don’t know how closely they
examined their own efficiencies at the state
level. But I never agreed with that.

I believe the legislature was too far
removed from the problem to understand
what any city’s problems were. If they were
trying to place limits on people’s ability to
raise income in a community, I think they
should have imposed the same kind of limits
on themselves. Spending for social services
was to drop from about $913,000 to $644,000,
and these cuts were going to come in things
like Elderport and drug and child abuse
programs. But Citifare was to keep quite a bit
of money. Citifare was really just getting on
its feet and depending heavily upon federal
financing.

This was at the time in the Reagan
administration when they were looking at a
tremendous number of cuts, particularly in the
area of social services, and the administration
was also making state and local governments
more responsible for their own financial
support rather than getting these monies out
of the federal government. The interesting
thing about it was that nobody was paying a
lot less money to the federal government—
the monies were just being apportioned in a
different way. The people on local levels have
to understand that in the end they’re not better

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

off at all, and really have a lot less to say about
how their monies are being spent I think that
there was a mood at that time that still prevails
to some extent today, government should
not be in the business of providing social
services. I think that we have seen enough of
the negative impacts of the government failing
to deal with social problems to know that it
is in the city’s best interest to look after the
concerns of a community.

In May of 1981, Reno withdrew from the
Regional Planning Commission. In April, the
city approved its own planning commission.
Sparks also withdrew from the planning
commission. They formed their own planning
department so they could be responsible for
their own future. Reno had decided at that
point in time that we, too, wanted the same
options. It was inappropriate for the Washoe
County Commission that had the final say
over the Regional Planning Commission to
make determinations for the city of Reno.
It was also true that the Washoe County
Commission at that time had a very pro¬
growth attitude, which certainly seemed to
be changing the city of Reno.

Many people who were appointed to boards
and commissions had been recommended by
the mayor with the city council’s approval. But
that isn’t true of all boards and commissions.
The planning commission was one of the
exceptions, because that was written into
the ordinance that created the commission.
So each council member was to appoint one
person with full council approval. At that time
I made a list of who they were, and it sort of
reminded me why things remained the status
quo as much for the next couple of years.

Ted Osgood, who was an engineer, was
appointed to the planning commission by
Dick Scott. Engineering is closely associated
with development interests, and he was a

member of the Homebuilders Association.
I didn’t know much about him, and I don’t
think a lot of us did.

Vi Sprenger, who was a licensed
contractor and a licensed architect, had done
a considerable amount of developing in the
area, and he was appointed to the commission
by Thornton. This was when the new council
came in in 1981.

Janice Pine appointed a vice-president
of the Pioneer Citizen’s Bank Harry
Zuehlsdorff. And Florence Lehners, with my
encouragement, appointed Steve Francis,
who passed away. It was a terrible shame. He
was a hardworking member of that planning
commission. I appointed Kathryn Wishart,
and Pete Sferrazza appointed Hill Moon, a
member of the black community in Reno.

Bill Moon’s record on the planning
commission was one of consistent approval
of growth in the area. I had good working
relations and close ties to the black community,
and I think I understood where he was
coming from, though I certainly wasn’t happy
about it. Bill’s idea was that blacks needed
employment, and he felt the good paying
jobs were to be found in the construction
industries. Well, there’s some truth in that, but
in my discussions I was never able to convince
him that those things are so temporary —if
they’re building hotel-casinos and they’re
building fast-food joints, when this building
is no longer going on, then where do they go
to work?

I never felt then and don’t feel now that
they were doing the black community any
great service supporting the kinds of projects
that Bill voted for. David Howard, who had
been an assistant secretary of state, had
indicated to me that he was very supportive
of what I was trying to do with growth. I
found out later that in my opinion, at least,
he certainly spoke with a forked tongue. He

Barbara Bennett

became more and more pro-growth, and just
obstinately so. Joe McClelland was the one
that appointed Mr. Howard, and with his
voting record, I should have expected that.
Joe would not have recommended someone
who thought as I did.

That was the composition of the initial
planning commission, and the result of the
recommendations that came out of it closely
paralleled the make-up of that commission,
and the people who appointed them, [laughs]
Steve Francis and Kathryn Wishart were the
loners on there, just kind of sitting back and
not able to accomplish what they hoped. Steve
Francis was an early chairman. He was a very
forceful guy, and I think that he was able to
make some inroads into the thinking on that
commission. But generally speaking it was
just business as usual.

During my administration there was a
rumor—which I’ve never been able to prove—
that some people in town had put up $10,000
to remove me from office. They never stopped
their efforts to discredit me. They gave up
trying to do it personally because they knew
they couldn’t. But they just harped at my
policies on growth constantly. I think that a
lot of those people decided the best way to
get me out of there was to get me down to the
governor’s office.

We were approaching the end of 1982,
and the elections were over and Dick Bryan
had been elected governor by that time. I
was a Democrat and I had supported him
personally—not publicly. He was my personal
choice. Because the mayoral office was non¬
partisan, I didn’t endorse any partisan offices,
but certainly personally he had my support
and he knew it.

I had a call from one of his top aides one
day. He said he’d heard that I was interested
in serving in the Bryan administration. As a

matter of fact, I had given it some thought.
John had had to take a medical disability,
and my $10,000 salary was not going very far.
We were both in our sixties by then—John in
his late sixties—and our future was not very
secure economically. I really felt I had to do
something. I knew I wasn’t going to run for
reelection. I couldn’t afford to, though I had
not said it publicly. I had said that I might not
run, but I did not come out and make a flat
declaration.

At any rate, apparently the word that
we were having financial problems did
get around. I got this call, and I said that I
probably would be interested in serving in
Dick’s administration. As a matter of fact, I
was glad to receive the call, because it wasn’t
something I would have asked for. They said
they’d get back to me, and the word leaked out
somehow that I was being considered for a job
with Dick’s administration. Ultimately I did
accept a job down there in the Youth Services
Division at better than three times the salary
that I was making in city hall, which at the
time was extremely valuable to us.

I really felt terrible about leaving office
early, but my first responsibility has always
been to my family. John had never been able
to work from the day he had his heart surgery
in 1979. It was hard for us at $10,000 a year.
We had to do something. We’d been prudent
and had managed to put some savings away,
but it wasn’t sufficient. We were just surviving.

It was a very painful decision, but it was
one I had to make. I told the governor that I
was interested, and that was my reason for
going. But there was a rumor about it, even
before a job was offered to me. I said, “They
contacted me, I didn’t contact them.” Anyway,
they really wanted me out of town, and the
development interests wanted to make sure
I didn’t run for office again. There were
probably some other business interests, too,

Service as Reno’s Mayor, 1979-1981

some of which disliked me personally, some
of which didn’t want me at city hall. There
were plenty of those around.

I had occasion to talk to Dick Scott, who
was serving on the council at that time. I
told him that I had received an offer from
the Bryan campaign, and he said that he
knew. He strongly implied that he had been
the mover and shaker on getting that done,
which kind of bothered me because then I
thought, “What is going on? What do we
have—casino interests that are interested
in getting me out of here, or is Dick really
concerned about my finances? Does he want
to help?” Dick Scott worked for Bob Cashell
who was lieutenant governor at that time.
Cashell and Bryan were not exactly “bosom
buddies.” I did feel that it was necessary to
talk to the governor about it. I wanted his
opinion on whether Dick Scott had, in fact,
been instrumental in doing me this great big
favor. Governor Bryan assured me that he had
not. Dick Scott was a funny guy. He’s a very
likable guy, but in my opinion, Dick Scott
sees himself as a kingmaker-someone behind
the scenes. It wasn’t just an impression I had
from working with him at city hall.... When
we went down to the governor’s inauguration,
they had just so many chairs sitting up on the
stage for people who were going to speak and
the newly elected state officials. Of course,
Bob Cashell was there. While a chair had not
been provided for him, Dick Scott still stood
on the stage.

With the Nevada Youth Services,
Common Cause, and the
Ethics Commission

I began my new job as deputy
administrator for the Youth Services Division
in Carson City on January 3,1982, which was
about a week or two after I left the mayors
job. I was hired as the deputy director. There
were a number of comments made that I had
always been so involved with seniors and
cared about them. I was serving on several
boards dealing with seniors’ issues and had
a governors appointment down there.

When my term ran out and the county
was taking over that board, I applied to be
reappointed, but the county turned me down.
All I can do is speculate. I guess publicly
elected officials are not too happy about
people who are no longer in public office
taking shots at them, [laughs] Especially those
with a big mouth like I have.

There were things that I felt I could really
contribute to what the seniors needed and
the way things should be done. But I figured,
“Well, there’s no sense in fighting another
battle at this point in time.” So I let it go.

But there had been comments made about
why, when I had been so involved with the
seniors, was I appointed to the Youth Services
Division? They saw that as being strange, but
perhaps it was because of my childhood—
which I had never discussed publicly before
this—that I had an interest in youth as well as
seniors. I found the work with the youth to be
absolutely fascinating—I loved it.

The man who was in charge of the Youth
Services Division had not been reappointed
and was leaving. But he was still there when I
arrived. I admitted to him that I didn’t know
anything about the Youth Services Division,
and asked him what to do. He told me about
looking things up in files and about records
to get into, and he was willing to talk about
these things. He had been a professional in
this line, so he was a good man.

At any rate, I can never do anything
halfway. I’m that way whether it comes to
cutting a lawn or cooking a meal or being
mayor...when I get into something, I go whole

Barbara Bennett

hog. I did in this job, too. One of my duties was
to gather, collate, and make recommendations
based on information.

For the most part, the Youth Services
Division dealt with probation and parole; it
dealt with kids who had been in trouble; it
dealt with kids who were not in trouble but
were being placed in foster homes. It also dealt
with a lot of abused children. Child care came
under it as well, which was an interest of mine
and had been when I was at city ball. But the
kids that I had the most emotional feel for, I
guess, were the kids that were being placed
in foster homes, many whom were going
through home after home after home. They
didn’t find any reason or explanation for this
with the kids that were being placed in our
institutions: the boys up at Elko and the girls
down in Caliente.

After a while of dealing with the statistics
and putting these things together, a lot of
things just hit me between the eyes. For
instance, the boys that were being sent up to
the Youth Services institution at Elko usually
had more than one offense that would have
been a felony had they been an adult. So they
were being committed for serious offenses
up there. (That place, incidentally, was run
by a very good man.) When I looked at the
statistics for the girls facility, I saw that the
girls were rarely being committed because of
serious offenses. They were being committed
because of prostitution, alcoholism, running
away, for being hard to handle—things that if
you were an adult would not even be a crime.
I really felt that there was a disparity and it
needed to be looked into.

Chuck McGee, who’s now a district judge,
was the juvenile master at that time. He has
always had such an interest in kids, and does
to this day. The conclusion that I reached
when I was down at Caliente was that we
didn’t need to be locking up girls who were

coming more often than not from abusive
backgrounds, just because of this. They were
more likely to turn toward criminal instincts
because of being incarcerated like this. I was
concerned, because at that time better than
50 percent of the girls were in the facility for
alcohol and drug problems, but they didn’t
have a drug counselor and or an alcoholic
counselor on the post.

I talked to Chuck McGee, Bob Fahrendorf,
and one of the women from the district
attorney’s office. Bob Fahrendorf was the
public defender at that time. We all worked
on these kinds of things and talked about
them. I felt that we needed to make a trip
down to Caliente to see for ourselves, rather
than just looking at numbers and abstracts.
We made an unannounced trip, which the
administration down there did not like. When
we got there we did not allow ourselves to
be herded in specific directions that they
wanted us to go—we wanted to see what
was happening. The place was clean, so I left
really reassured on that count. But although
the staff did try hard, I felt that they were
professionally incompetent to deal with the
problems of those kids. I think there was a
consensus on that.

Another problem existed, though, which
I discussed with Carlos Romo, who was then
the director of Youth Services. It was my
opinion that one of the main problems that
we had was that there was no place to put
these kids who were runaways, prostitutes,
and truants. When one case went to court in
which a girl was being committed to Caliente,
I testified at the hearing and said that I didn’t
think that it was wise to do that. But the judge’s
question was a very valid one. It was, “Well,
where do we put her?” What was needed was
sort of halfway houses for these kinds of kids.

Chuck McGee now has this idea for
something which is like a halfway house.

With the Nevada Youth Services, Common Cause, and the Ethics Commission

I’m not sure what he calls it, but it’s for these
kinds of kids so they can really be helped. He
is someone that I’ve got to get in touch with
soon to see if that’s an area in which I can
offer some help. I don’t know whether I can,
but I would like to be involved. The halfway
house that Chuck has in mind is going to be
right here in Washoe County. I think with the
Chuck McGees of the world out there looking
after kids, things have got to get better. I really
am so impressed with him.

I sometimes had contact with foster
parents. Occasionally a parent would come
into the office if their kid was in trouble. I
was also in touch with the kids when I went
down to Caliente, but not often. What you
see is a name on a piece of paper with the
offense and the person’s track record. To a
certain extent I was involved in helping place
children in foster homes. Good foster parents
are very hard to find. I think maybe now the
state provides the foster parents with sufficient
monies to really take care of that youngster as
if he were their own. They receive money for
medical use, clothing allowances, food—for
all of these kinds of things that are needed.

But sometimes people who volunteer to
be foster parents really don’t have that much
interest in the children. They want the money.
They feel they can make money off of these
youngsters. That’s why I say that good foster
parents are hard to find. At the same time,
you don’t want to lose them when you find
them. There are also countless cases of foster
homes where children have been abused or
molested. It’s pretty hard to know these things.
You can do a thorough investigation, but
maybe that family never neglected, abused, or
molested that child in the past. All of a sudden
they’re presented with an opportunity, and
unfortunately, too often take advantage of it.

Clark County is way ahead of us in these
kinds of things. They have better facilities and

more of this kind of halfway house thing, so
they have alternatives in dealing with kids.
They’re way ahead of us in dealing with child
abuse, too. They’ve had a center down there
for years. So there are a lot of things that still
need to be done here to protect kids, to give
them a fighting chance of getting out of this
lifestyle in which they, more often then not,
have been forced by being poor.

In order for a halfway house to work,
there would have to be a certain amount of
trust between the adults and youth. In other
words, if the youth wouldn’t stay and accept
the help that was offered, the alternative might
be confinement. I assume that something of
this nature has to be understood between
the staff and kids in order for them to work.
And there would have to be absolutely a very
competent, well-trained staff. The kids also
need to be accessible to family so that they
can have a tie to parents who are interested
enough to maintain it and want to help.

We have some good probation officers
out in some of the small counties around
here who work closely with these things.
Some of them do good things locally, too,
but it does cost some money to get things
done. Unless the state’s willing to put up the
bucks for it, a lot of these things that could be
done will not get done, and in my opinion,
the state is not willing to put up enough
money. That may be too broad a statement,
because in my opinion, the problems that I’ve
been talking about must first be brought to
the attention of the governor. I don’t know
whether they were.

A significant savings could be realized
by not incarcerating these kids. It’s very
expensive to lock them up, and alternative
facilities would be far less costly and more
effective. If the governor and legislature were
informed of this fact, I think that they would
go for it. It’s in their own best interest to do so.

Barbara Bennett

The National Judicial College at the
university really helped me because I took
several courses. There were also two- and
three-day seminars that we attended. We
learned how other states are dealing with
some of these problems, particularly in the
areas of foster parenting and dealing with
parents’ loss of control over their child and the
court having to take over and be responsible
for the kids. The National Judicial College
has had a number of helpful seminars, and I
presume it still does.

I left the Youth Services Division in
January of 1984. There were a number of
reasons why-John’s health wasn’t good. I really
felt guilty about leaving home at 6:30 in the
morning and not getting back until 6:00 or
6:30 in the evening I didn’t like leaving him
alone if something happened.

Another thing is I had a lot of trouble with
my back. Matter of fact, I had back surgery
many years ago. It doesn’t take much to kick
it out. The worst thing in the world is to be
seated in a position for any period of time
where you’re limited in movement. That hour
trip to work in the morning and another hour
in the evening was causing me some health
problems.

Another thing was I really disliked the
red tape. I went through the director, who
in turn went through the head of Human
Services. Then if they decide that there is
something the governor ought to know,
it goes to him. It’s frustrating. It’s not like
being mayor, where I could go storming into
the governor’s office or whatever! [laughs] I
really liked the job. If it had been in Reno,
I’d probably still be there—although with
John’s continuing problems, it might not
have been possible—but there were just
too many reasons for leaving. I did regret
leaving, because I really enjoyed the job.

One group concerned with the issue of
high spending is Common Cause. Common
Cause was founded in about 1970 by John
Gardner as a national organization and sort
of a people’s lobby kind of thing. A lot of their
concerns parallel mine. I had been a member
back in the seventies, but when things got a
little tough financially...you didn’t pay dues to
all of these organizations that you did when
things were sailing along. I dropped Common
Cause for a while, and then got back to it
because they were still doing the kinds of
things that I believed in. They believe in ethics
in government and they take on everybody-
they don’t care whether it’s a Republican or a
Democrat or who it is. They still do to this day.
They have pushed hard for limiting PACs, and
they expose anyone who they feel is abusing
an elective office. I have great respect for them.

It was my privilege to serve with Archibald
Cox. He’s chairman of the board of Common
Cause, and has been for a long time. I served
on the national governing board, and he
works with all of those people. I don’t believe
there is anyone in any party who does not
respect Archie Cox. I think he has that kind
of an image with the public.

I was chosen for the national governing
board by national elections. The Common
Cause members all over the country are sent
a ballot with an explanation or little story on
everyone that’s running. I had been nominated
by the local Nevada Common Cause in late
1983,1 think. I was elected in 1985. That was
absolutely one of the greatest experiences of
my life, serving on that board. The people
that were elected were so intelligent, so
hardworking, so involved, so caring. It’s not
like going to almost any meeting where you
get bored. The meetings always took off from
the moment we’d get there with discussions
and votes, recommendations and then

With the Nevada Youth Services, Common Cause, and the Ethics Commission

counterarguments...it goes on and on. They
bring in representatives from the state levels to
tell what’s going on. So many state Common
Cause groups have been responsible for
meaningful ethics legislation and campaign
finance laws that are good. They have played
such an important role.

There are 60 people who serve on the
governing board, and we meet quarterly.
The terms are three years. You meet the most
fascinating people—just wonderful people...
so bright. Sometimes you just sit there in awe
and listen to them. The governing board is
very representative of all parts of the country,
and all races. But in Nevada—and across the
nation, to some extent-Common Cause has
been unable to attract a lot of minorities into
the membership. I don’t how why, because
certainly the kinds of things that they’re
involved in are those things that benefit
minorities or young people. But they just
haven’t been able to really bring them in.

Joe Robertson, who is also from Common
Cause, and I tried going up to the university to
talk to some of the university students. They
seemed to agree with us, but they didn’t feel
they had the time or the money or something
to get involved. They’d rather let someone
else do it. At that rate, Common Cause is not
attracting enough young people, and I think
that is a major concern.

During our board meetings, we obviously
had a lot of discussion about PACS, which are
special interest groups that donate money to
candidates. Anybody that believes that money
doesn’t buy anything when you pour a lot into
a campaign is naive. It’s bull. I think someone
who says that doesn’t really believe it, but it
sounds good to say it. Anybody who serves in
office who says, “I took $ 1,000, but that doesn’t
mean it’s going to buy me anything,”-is full of
BULL. I’ve never known it to do otherwise.

I’ve never known of instances where either
incumbents or candidates took monies from
special groups and turned around and voted
against their interests.

Along with discussing PACs, Common
Cause talked about ethics in government.
Civil rights has also been a big thing because
it was the feeling of the majority of the
governing board that civil rights were taking
a beating in the Reagan administration, and
that we really had to watch it cautiously.

Archibald Cox felt that it was important
not to spread ourselves too thinly, and
Common Cause has always remembered that.
But there have been times when issues were so
important to people, like Bark’s nomination
for the Supreme Court. A vote was taken as
to whether we should get involved. It was a
close vote because we had not been involved
in that kind of thing before. But because it was
one of the issues that would affect minorities,
Common Cause people felt strongly about it.
Bork had been questioned on certain things
and apparently answered unsatisfactorily,
or his track record was such that it scared
Common Cause members. But it was a close
vote, because of this idea of sticking only to
a few things that we could deal with and be
effective in.

I was state chair of Common Cause for
two years, 1985 and 1986. We didn’t have a
president—only a chair. This was a year before
and also a year during my national term. Each
year, national Common Cause sends out a
questionnaire dealing with the issues that
had been before the board and were going to
continue to be discussed during the next year.
Reports and polls based on the questionnaire
are given so that the board remains in
constant touch with its membership, and we
did that sometimes on a local level. During
the two years I was on the state board, the

Barbara Bennett

people of Nevada felt our main role should
be dealing with ethics in government and
doing something about campaign financing.
So that’s where our efforts were concentrated.

There are about 648 state members today
and the basis of the membership is in Reno.
The strength of Common Cause has been
in Reno because of some very good people,
starting with Merle Benet who was the first
chairman. Some other people who are active
included Gerald Prindiville, who’s over in
Carson City; Orland Outland; Marion Siever;
Joe Robertson; Irving Sandorfi... They have
been so active and so loyal to Common Cause
for so many years, they make us feel guilty!
They are the backbone of Common Cause.

During my term, we became very much
aware that we were too much of a Reno
organization, and we wanted to spread out,
but people who are retired who belong
to Common Cause don’t always have the
finances to travel statewide. (Common Cause
was not a wealthy organization, although
we’d been building a nice fund and reached
the point where we really could afford to do
a number of things.) The governing board
was elected here, although the ballots were
sent out statewide. We decided to really have
a recruiting effort and stretch ourselves into
Las Vegas. In order to do that, we felt the best
way to go about it was to hire an executive
director, which many other successful states
have done. So that’s the direction we went.

Our first executive director didn’t pan
out the way we had hoped that he would;
Leola Armstrong was the unanimous choice
to succeed him. She is the executive director
of Common Cause in Nevada today. I have a
tremendous amount of respect for her—she
really gets things done. She agreed to serve
on the board in the beginning and was a
great contributor to it. Everyone is so pleased
with the evolvement and the involvement

of Common Cause now in these issues
statewide. We’re going to be hearing a lot more
from Common Cause in the future, too.

I’m not active in Common Cause now.
I’m certainly philosophically supportive of
them with whatever contributions we can
make, because I believe in them. I think that
they are now in a position to have a very
strong voice in the legislature when it comes
to the kinds of things they’re interested in:
ethics legislation, and campaign financing and
restructuring. There are some elected officials
in Las Vegas who have expressed an interest
in that, and certainly Sue Wagner comes to
mind once again. In the past she introduced
legislation on this issue—or tried to. But it
went nowhere. It’s very difficult to get people
who are elected and sitting in an office to
agree to toughen standards for themselves. I
don’t know...maybe the only way to ever do
it is going to be through initiative petitions.

National Common Cause sends out a
tremendous amount of information, such
as the information I requested on ethics
legislation from cities all over the country.
They have a research staff that is there that
can provide local groups with just about any
information, and if they don’t have it, they’ll
get it for you. Common Cause is an action
group.

Lobbying is a big thing in Washington
with National Common Cause, and it is a
big thing in all local state governments. They
accomplish so many things. But these gaps are
always out there when it comes to putting the
final nail on that coffin that will really offer
legislation that the public is entitled to have.
“People’s lobby” is a term that is sometimes
used, but not always in a complimentary
fashion. I don’t know what’s wrong with it,
but there are those who seem to think there’s
something wrong with the people lobbying.
Generally speaking, I think that Common

With the Nevada Youth Services, Common Cause, and the Ethics Commission

Cause is well respected on the national level.
I think that anyone who wants to be fair
recognizes that Common Cause takes on
Republicans and Democrats alike—they don’t
care who it is. The membership is made up
of both parties and independents, and they
deserve respect. But I don’t think the public
knows enough about them.

I’m not active in Common Cause
anymore, but I have started my second
term as a member of the State of Nevada
Commission on Ethics. We meet on an on-
call basis. Whenever someone has an ethical
question for the commission, they send a
request to the chair, who is Carl F. Dodge. He
is a hard-working chair, it’s an active group,
but we are very limited by law as to what we
can deal with.

Most of us on the commission feel that
there are things that we would like to be more
involved in, but we are restricted because
of the Ethics Law. It dictates what we’re
permitted to do and what we’re not permitted
to do. For instance, we have absolutely no
authority where campaign contributions are
concerned. The law says that you can issue an
opinion, and the requesting party does not
have to make that opinion public, but can if he
or she so chooses. In my opinion, the problem
with that kind of thinking is that obviously
they’re not going to make it public unless it’s
favorable for them to do so.... But most of the
kinds of things that we’re dealing with fall
under these kinds of limitations—they are not
covered under the law, and therefore we have
no authority. The legislature was very specific
in passing that law to limit the responsibility
of the Ethics Commission.

The Commission was there in the past,
but it was sleepwalking for so many years.
It came back in the early 1980s, when Bryan
was elected in 1982. But obviously it had to

be funded, and the legislature is the only one
that can fund it, so there were people in the
legislature who put up the necessary money
to get it going again.

There are five people on the Commission.
I was appointed initially by Sue Wagner, and
I would guess that that would have been
with the Governor’s approval. Sue served on
a committee to kind of reactivate this group
and get it going again, I guess. The law spells
out representation on the Commission—like,
a former member of a city, government or
county commission; so many from Las Vegas;
and you can’t have them from the same party.
So there are some restrictions or limitations
on who can serve on this thing. For instance, a
Democratic governor couldn’t have appointed
an entirely Democratic board and vice versa.

Reflections on Nevada Politics

One of the things that I have always liked
about Nevada is that it is a small enough state
so that you could know your governors. I have
known all the governors from Grant Sawyer
on through Dick Bryan on a first-name basis.
My sister just can’t get over that, being from
San Francisco. She says, “My gosh, you know
the governor?’

“Well,” I say, “everybody knows the
governor, you know!” [laughs] That’s one of
the really nice things about Nevada: you can
have easy access to almost any elected official.
Obviously some officials on a local level are
better about offering that access and some are
a lot better about paying attention when you
do. But you know your city council people;
you know your county commissioners; you
know your legislators. It’s wonderful. If you’ve
got something that you want to say to them,
you know how to reach them, and you can talk
to them in person. You can go down to the
legislature; you can get them on the telephone;
you can write them a letter, and they’ll
respond. There are not many communities
or states that really enjoy that.

I don’t have any problem with Nevada
politics. We’re a very split state. It’s interesting
because down at the legislature last session
one house was Democratic and the other
Republican. We had a Republican governor,
Bob List, prior to Dick arriving there. So there
doesn’t seem to be any great effort to lock into
a party situation. I really believe that more
so than in most places, Nevada elects on the
basis of the individual I think they cross party
lines a lot to put the person in there that they
want. I have a great deal of respect for a lot of
people politically in this state. I think we’ve
had some good elected representatives in
Washington, and Nevada has had some really
good governors since we’ve lived here.

I think that Mike O’Callaghan was a
really fine governor. I think Grant Sawyer
was a good governor...they all had different
positive aspects to them. I think Dick Bryan
is a good governor. I didn’t know List as well,
but I never had any problems with him. We
always worked well together. I only met the
lieutenant governor, Bob Miller, briefly. I don’t
know a lot about Bob, only what I’ve read in

Barbara Bennett

the papers, and our meetings were too brief to
really form any opinions of him. Therefore, I
don’t know what kind of a governor he’ll make
if he steps in for Richard Bryan.

But there are some other people I can
think of that I like. For instance, there’s Brian
McKay, who is the attorney general of the state
of Nevada. I think he’s a very decent man. I
don’t know whether he can, but I know he
would like to do something about ethics in
government and about the spending situation.
He was a speaker at a Common Cause
banquet that we had. I guess you don’t really
consider these kinds of people as friends...
acquaintances is what you are.

There are a lot of people in the legislature
that I admire. I think Sue Wagner is absolutely
marvelous. She’s been there 16 years now, I
think. She’s able to be her own person. While
the Republican party obviously has a more
conservative agenda where people issues
are concerned, Sue has still worked to meet
the needs of the people in this state. If we’re
going to have a woman governor of this state
sometime, she’d certainly be one that I would
look strongly to support—even though I’m a
Democrat and she’s a Republican. It doesn’t
matter. We’ve worked together.

I’ve had a good rapport, good working
relationships with most of the people down
there in Carson City, although some come
and go so quickly you barely get to know
them. We’ve also been changing hands lately,
as far as our Washington representatives are
concerned. I endorsed Howard Cannon when
he ran. There was a very good reason for
that: Chic Hecht was his opponent. I did not
support him then and I do not support him
now. He represents the extreme right element
in the state of Nevada, in my opinion.

I have not been happy with a lot of the
votes that Chic Heck has cast in Washington.

During my visits bad in Washington, the
clear analysis of his abilities that came to
me via the people that I met and talked with
was that he was not doing Nevada any favors
being our representative. I felt that way, too.
Chic Hecht is running for the Senate again.
I remember his campaign so well when he
ran before. It was run by some people out of
Southern California, and I think they knew
that he was not the kind of man who ought
to be exposed to the public if they wanted to
get him elected. I’m serious. They hid him.
You never saw him, and you’re not seeing him
again in this election. You’re seeing all these
people talking about Chic Hecht, but you are
not seeing Chic Hecht. I think that that’s very
interesting, because I think that he owes it to
the voters of the state of Nevada to say these
things himself if he wants us to believe him.

I think Harry Reid will make a good
senator. He’s been in politics a long time. He
was lieutenant governor; he served on the
gaming board; he served in the legislature;
he served in the House. So he has had the
experience. I think we’re seeing some benefits
coming out of his election. He’s putting a
water thing together where he’s calling all
these people in and trying to negotiate some
sort of a workable solution. It appears today
that maybe they’ve reached some sort of
understanding that will help a little. His hands
are going to be tied, and so is the group that
he’s working with, because of laws that are
involved. I think that he is a caring man and
he’s honest, but he’s certainly not my idea of a
liberal Democrat. I think he’s a very moderate
Democrat.

Barbara Vucanovich is beginning to talk
about things now. [laughs] Barbara’s votes
obviously are not very compatible with mine.
But that’s not true in everything—sometimes
I agree with her votes. She’s like the rest

Reflections on Nevada Politics

of us. When we enter public office, there’s
no training ground for a mayor...there’s no
training ground for your first trip back to
Washington. I think that she’s more articulate
in the positions that she takes. I just don’t
happen to agree with them. And I really
dislike political expediency where issues are
concerned. Barbara Vucanovich has been
in Washington two terms already, and now
all of a sudden she’s talking about child care
because this has become a great selling point
nationally.

I don’t approve of the way that the
Republicans think they can solve the problem.
I think the problem is too acute. But they
seem to believe that the private sector can
solve everything, and it cant. I think that
we’ve seen so much proof of this over the last
several years. I don’t understand why there is
this thinking that everything that is healthy
and good for this country comes from the
private sector, and everything that is bad and
rotten comes from government, no matter
what level.

People who think like that figure that the
government can run on fewer and fewer bucks,
no matter what their level of income is. It
could be decimated, and they’d still think that
they could get by on less. People don’t grant
the same concessions to government that
they grant to business. In other words, they
don’t let people who are elected by the people
decide how the money can best be spent.
They make those decisions for themselves,
but they don’t like the idea that government
is free to make them. I really believe that
government has an obvious, necessary role in
a lot of elements of our democracy at local,
state, and national levels. That may be the
basic premise of the Democratic party, but it
should be the basic premise of democracy, not
just the Democratic party! I think that should

be a premise for Republicans, Independents,
and everyone alike.

I’m not at all involved anymore with the
Democratic party. There were times when
I was somewhat active and did my turn
in helping with conventions and serving
on committees. I didn’t exactly give up,
because I still follow party politics, but I’m
no longer active in it. I dislike party politics
intensely. I dislike Republican party politics;
I dislike Democratic party politics. There’s
an underlying reason: these someones- the
political mucky-mucks in the state—get their
heads together and they decide who they want
to run for office. The people are not making
that decision most of the time—somebody is
making it for them. Certainly someone can
drop into the race and run, but the parties
know who they’re going to support; who they
will not actively support; who they don’t want
to see run. That’s my problem with politics.

There is this power structure behind
things that thinks they can mold a candidate
to the platform of the party, whether it be
Democratic or Republican politics. For
example, they want someone to run for
governor, but that person strays from the
party line in one or two areas and they want
that person brought back in line. That doesn’t
work for me. I certainly don’t have a problem
with all Republicans, and I certainly don’t
with all Democrats. But I think that there’s
too much of that.

When I came out of the Reno mayoralty
primary victorious, there were a bunch of
big-wheel Democrats who met in Vegas. They
wanted to know what the hell they were going
to do about that crazy woman up in Reno who
just might win the general election, [laughs]
That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. In
the first place, they want somebody that they

Barbara Bennett

think can win, and it wasn’t until after the
primary that they realized I might. So I didn’t
scare them any until then. I know that they
sensed that I was not the kind of person that
they could mold into their own image. It’s my
opinion that they don’t like to deal with those
things. That’s why I don’t like party politics.

Nevada’s special interests which prevail
are probably worse than those in Washington,
D.C. They are the ones that have the money,
they are the ones that have always been a part
of the power structure; they are the ones that
got us where we are today. And they will keep
us there if we don’t strive to change it.

I believe that one of the big problems
in government today at all levels is that we
simply do not trust our elected officials.
Until the day comes when elected officials
are willing to go these extra steps where
ethics and government are concerned, we
are not going to change what is happening
in government today. You do it by speaking
out constantly, but you don’t say one thing
to the public one time and another thing the
next. If you tell them you’re not going to take
special interest money, you don’t take it. You
tell them that we have a problem with air
pollution—they’re not stupid, they can look
outside and see that it’s a problem, and they
know what’s causing it. They want someone to
tell them that they’re willing to do something
about these problems. But it’s hard to get these
kinds of people to run in an election. I am an
exception, sad to say.

When Ronald Reagan was sworn in in
1980, the country began a move toward
becoming ultra-conservative, ultra-right¬
wing. I’m conservative in very many ways,
but this was an ultra-right-wing swing. I think
Nevada is one of the most right-winged states
in the nation today. That process has been a

gradual one, and I wish I could account for
it, but I can’t.

I happen to personally believe that
this is the most corrupt administration in
Washington, D.C., in the history of this
country. They’re all getting rich off one
another. The ethics questions are there,
regardless of Oliver North and Ed Meese, who
heads up the justice system in this country.
Then there’s the Pentagon. We have been
starving our social programs to build up our
military, and now we find that probably as
much as billions could have been going into
the pockets of crooked people who have used
crooked politicians, or they couldn’t have
achieved this. I think that a reaction to this
type of politics is what got me elected mayor
in 1979.

I wish that the world, the city, and the state
were full of people who want to run for office
only because they want to serve—not because
they hope to gain any personal or financial
advantage from it. There are some of those
around and we have to find them. We have to
do something legally to stop this proliferation
of PACs and the spending of money to run for
office, because it’s absolutely asinine.

Let’s say I wanted to run against
Vucanovich—and this is not to say that I do.
How do you raise the money to do that? I was
elected mayor because I could essentially still
walk the city of Reno. When you get to looking
at a statewide broad-scoped office, you can’t
confine it to where you can walk. You’ve got to
have money. Anyone running for office should
be able to do that on the basis of contributions
from people who live within the state... from
those people you’re going to represent. But
I think that limitations absolutely must be
placed on campaign spending. They say that
there are some legal niceties about this that are

Reflections on Nevada Politics

very troublesome. They say that you can’t stop
people from giving any amount of money that
they want to a candidate unless it is prohibited
by federal election laws. But the lawyers that
I’ve talked to seem to believe that you can limit
expenditures. And if you limit expenditures,
then a candidate for office has no reason to
go around collecting all the money that they
can get their hands on..

We’ve got all these splits now. We’ve got
labor unions giving to Democrats, and we’ve
got big business giving to Republicans, and
occasionally they play both ends. They give
to both sides so that their butt is covered
no matter who’s elected. But the democratic
process is not supposed to work that way,
because what it amounts to is that we’re
buying public office. It’s open to the highest
bidder.

Epilogue

I’ve always been extremely competitive,
and it didn’t matter whether I was competing
with men or women. I think that that gets you
over any fear of competition, whether it’s in a
debating arena or playing a game. However,
there were disappointments I experienced
as mayor. One disappointment was the fact
that I never was able to get the kinds of
information from our planning staff that I
saw as being critical to a really sane growth
policy with which we could live comfortably. I
didn’t want anything cast in stone, but instead
something that could be changed if a better
thing came along. But I never was able to get
the cumulative information I wanted. In other
words, we had a lot of projects backed up.
When I go to review a new project, I want to
know exactly what resources it will require—
what kind of traffic it will generate, the need
for new police officers, new fire stations, new
schools, new parks, all of the streets. Can we
handle it?...can we afford it?

The planning staff should have been
doing that. But the planning staff takes its
orders, presumably, from the city council and

I was sitting in a position where obviously
not everyone agreed with me on the Reno
City Council. To this day, they do not have
sufficient information on which to base a
decision to approve or disapprove a project.

It is painful to look back over a lot of
this, because I really was not successful in
accomplishing what I wanted to. When I see
what’s happening today, I realize how tragic it
is. I don’t know...if there had been some other
way to do it, I didn’t know what it was.

One thing I would like to see more of,
which has been a major disappointment, is
voter turnout. It has been a huge problem in
local government. When people really care
about a community, how they can stay home
on election day is beyond me-I don’t care
whether it’s a city, county, state, or federal
election. Their voice is cast with their vote.
I would certainly like to see someone in a
public role today attempting to encourage
more people to vote.

It’s hard to say what I’m proud of. One
of the things was the state award that I got

Barbara Bennett

from Common Cause for leadership in the
public interest It was rewarding and brought
me great pride. That was in 1980. Then two
years later, I received the National Governing
Award from National Common Cause. It was
one of five national awards for leadership
in the public interest. Names are submitted
from all over the country for that. All of the
states submit names, along with why people
are being nominated for this. I was one of five
chosen, and I’m extremely proud of that. I was
shocked, because I didn’t think anybody knew
about a little old lady from Reno, Nevada.

As to my accomplishments while mayor,
getting the ethics law passed was important,
but I think more importantly at that time,
the first and best thing that I did for Reno
was to really establish the Reno Planning
Commission and our planning staff. I didn’t
do that alone, obviously. That was something
on which the early council and I agreed, and
we got it.

Another thing I’m proud of is that I have
made a very persistent on-going insistence to
label what water we have, and to not approve
anything for which we do not have sufficient
water. As time goes on, I think I’m more
and more often being proven accurate in my
assessments of things that are going to come
down the road if we do not deal with water
availability as a serious element of planning.
Here we are—still trying to deal with it, and
the situation is far more critical.

The thing that maybe I ought to take the
greatest pride in, and I do feel very good about,
is bringing the public back in to a very strong
and meaningful role in city government. They
became active and showed up at meetings at
city hail. It didn’t sway the votes normally,
because here we were still sitting with the
development forces on one side and the
people on the other. The public was really
getting involved, and they have remained

involved. You still see neighborhood groups
functioning around town. You see them
showing up at council meetings expressing
their approval or disapproval of things.

I did make recommendations and in
numerous instances was able to get people
appointed to boards and commissions. The
people represented a broad cross-section
of the community. One of these boards was
CPPAC—the Citizens Planning and Policy
Advisory Committee. I also established very
good working relationships with the minority
communities in town. I don’t think that that
ever had been done before.

When I arrived in office, I think people
had high hopes that someone was really
going to be doing what they promised them
to do when they ran for office. And I did
that. Everyone knew I was honest. There
was never any question about it, and the
opportunities for dishonesty are rampant
in any government. I was able during those
three-and-a-half years that I was there to
really give the public a sense of an elected
official’s honesty, integrity and ethics...to
let them know that they really mattered for
something in this city, and that their opinions
on what they wanted their city to be was as
important to me as it was to them.

I never ran for office to get rich, but I
would have liked to have made enough so that
I could have stayed. Maybe that’s why no one
was willing to raise the salary, [laughs]

There’s been a substantial increase
in diversifying the economic base in the
community. This has to be beneficial in view
of the fact that we’re seeing the potential
for gaming being discussed in a lot of other
communities, such as Atlantic City, and
various lotteries in states like California. What
that says to me is that we no longer have an
exclusive claim where gaming is concerned.

Epilogue

We’re going to have to share this, which means
that we’re probably going to lose some of these
tourists to other communities. I also believe
that the national economy is a factor in how
gaming does.

I think that it has always been fairly
dear, as far as economic diversification is
concerned, that Nevada has a lot of plusses.
We have no corporate tax, we are a freeport
state, we have no personal income tax, and I
know that when we discussed with business
people the positive aspects of Nevada as far
as economic diversification was concerned,
those were the kinds of things that were
important to them. It was also important to a
lot of those people that we show an indication
of the willingness to move away from making
gaming the absolute major source of economy
in this state. I think there’s been a great deal
of success.

Because of the freeport law, we’ve had a
substantial warehousing industry, and that
has grown a great deal. It’s grown to where
we no longer have the industry just catering
to smaller-type businesses. We’ve had a
General Motors plant that’s come in, as well
as Porsche...every day now you pick up the
paper and read about a new industry that is
moving into the area, and very often it falls
into that category of business. But we’re also
still attracting a lot of other types of industries,
and a major factor in that has been EDAWN.
It has brought business people together that
were interested in economic diversification.
Since its founding it has really continued to
thrive and has been very effective.

It is still my strong belief that we have not
paid sufficient attention to how we make our
available resources fit with any kind of growth,
whether it be economic diversification or
continued expansion of the gaming industry.
I don’t believe that that has been addressed
sufficiently yet.

I was interviewed by the Gazette in
November of 1980. We discussed the growth
issue, and, of course, gaming. A lot of casinos
have closed in Reno since then, so that
indicates that the gaming industry is also
vulnerable. Most of the casinos that have
closed have been individually owned and
operated—small-type casinos. It’s really sad
because that’s the sort of thing that Reno was
built on: the economy of the small casinos.
The small casinos were really having trouble
surviving, much the same as the motel
operators.

I believe that corporate gaming is
essentially healthy. The large hotels like Circus
Circus and the Nugget in Sparks have been
well run and operated. The Nugget has had
almost exclusive rights in the Sparks area, and
it is succeeding very well.

There’s been a move from years ago, when
there were 5- and 10-cent slot machines
that brought in a lot of seniors who couldn’t
afford to play dollar slots, or even the 25-cent
machines. Those machines literally supported
gaming in this community for many years. I
suppose that economic necessities were the
reason for the changes to more expensive
machines, so that overhead costs could be
paid and a profit could be made. I know even
when I was in office I had groups of people
from around Roseville and Sacramento,
California—particularly seniors clubs-that
used to get a busload and come up here.
They used to come up and enjoy playing the
nickel and dime slot machines. They said it
became more and more difficult to have their
money last long enough so they could have
a little fun and go home. But obviously the
gaming community felt that the nickel and
dime players were not what this community
needed. As a matter of fact, an attitude seemed
to develop that we needed to get away from
the small-time attitude and move towards

Barbara Bennett

the direction that Las Vegas successfully had
taken.

I had always hoped that we would never
become a city like Las Vegas. I think that’s why
a lot of us love the place, and we didn’t want
to see another Las Vegas here. Yet, today we’re
seeing this comparison between how much
Las Vegas is growing and how many hotel-
casinos they have, compared to our somewhat
slower rate of growth. I think the comparisons
are very unfair. The population down there
wants this kind of expansion. When it comes
time for them to deal with the water problems
and the cost of it, then it’s up to the people of
that community to make a decision. They have
apparently decided that they don’t mind all
this growth scattered all over the community
in hotel-casinos. But the people in Reno made
it clear they didn’t want that

There was an article in the paper where
someone said that Las Vegas casinos do so
much more for their community than Reno
casinos do. Certainly, the person who rote
the article probably didn’t have any dear
indication of what local casinos did in the
way of community service or community
contributions dollar-wise. I think now that
maybe as a result, a lot of the casinos are
making community contributions—more
than they were advertising. I think also that
there is a greater generosity on the part of the
casinos in the community. I sense that they
are contributing more now to social programs
and things than has ever been true in the past.

Redevelopment in the downtown area
has been so much slower than I expected it to
be. Progress can only be measured in inches,
in my opinion. For instance, we’ve had these
corners down there that have been the cause
of a lot of disputes and arguments in the
community because they were so slick that
people have slipped on them. The city is still
working on these corners.

Several months ago there was some
money appropriated from the downtown
redevelopment fund to improve the alleys in
downtown Reno. It wasn’t two weeks when
that alley work was underway. That was
because the alleys run between casinos down
there, and those people are in a position to
exert some pressure to get this work done.
Well, I guess it was six weeks—no longer
than eight weeks—that some of the alleys
were completed. One alley that runs north
and south between Harold’s and Harrah’s
dubs was finished in nothing flat. Now if we
can finish an alley that fast so that we don’t
inconvenience gaming patrons, why can’t
we finish these street corners? That slowness
really puzzles me.

Another thing that is bothering me is
that I am not seeing beautification in Reno.
There should be some greenery and some
nice benches and areas where people can sit
out and have lunch...a break away from the
casinos for a bit, where they’d be breathing
some fresh air. I am disappointed that this
hasn’t happened. Obviously Reno has been
cleaned up. But if we still have as many
absentee landowners in the downtown area
as we did when I was in office, we’re going to
continue to have a problem with preserving
whatever we do down there. Unless the
property owners are willing to be responsible
for keeping the front of their areas cleaned and
beautified, we’re going to continue to have a
problem.

The long-time business people in Reno
have always taken good care of their property,
I think, because they face the public. I don’t
get downtown that often anymore, so maybe
they’ve made progress beyond that which I’m
aware of. As far as the downtown buildings are
concerned, I think there are more restrictions
in the building code now than there were at
the time of the construction of Circus Circus.

Epilogue

Once a year the newspaper runs “The Best
and Worst of Reno.” In the downtown, Circus
Circus has won the most ugly building and
for many years...I kind of lost track of it. It
isn’t something I’m proud of. I think Circus
Circus is gaudy, and it certainly doesn’t add
to beautification of downtown Reno.

I have always had mixed feelings over
water meters. I really understand that they are
a tremendous conservation method. However,
in fact they do not generate an additional drop
of water. They are a conservation method
because they are compelling the existing
population to use less water. Now, while the
population has continued to grow, this year
Sierra Pacific allocated about an acre-foot per
family. Then the allocation dropped to three-
quarters, and now it’s down below that. If they
get their way, I feel that we’re soon going to
be down to about one-fifth of an acre-foot,
which is going to create more problems than
we have.

I have a lawn out there and I have trees.
I’ve been growing them for 18 years at this
location. They provide a certain aesthetic
satisfaction for me, but they also provide
oxygen and cooler air. But we’re seeing people
removing trees and lawns, and planting rock
and what-have-you. That isn’t the kind of
community that I want to live in, quite frankly.
I believe that we can all be very conservative
in the use of water while still maintaining our
gardens and lawns. For instance, I do a lot of
drip watering, but we are absolutely at the
mercy of the weather, and we have a terrible
drought situation this year.

A lot of people in other communities
meter their water. The cost to install the
meters would also be over $300,1 heard. So
you have a substantial investment just in the
water meter. We’ve seen the result of water
meters in other communities like Mann

County and San Francisco. Water was scarce,
but the smaller amount of water the people
used, the more the cost was. That was because
the water provider there felt that they had to
have a certain amount of income. That same
thing would be a cinch to happen here. If they
were selling less water than they needed to
make their 14 percent profit that they were
allowed, they’d raise the cost for water. So
eventually we’d be using less water, and it
would cost us more to do so. That scenario
has always troubled me, so I’ve always felt
that one of the solutions, if they want water
meters, was to have the purveyor in the area
provide them.

The other thing that I do not believe is
that profits should be made through passing
associated costs on to everybody. I do believe
that water should be metered during drought
times when it’s really in everyone’s best
interest, but at other times, when that water
is rushing down the river and we have no
shortage, metering water is wrong.

Many people come to our community
who really don’t have an interest in the water
shortage, like the people who come and stay in
the casinos. But I think that the responsibility
lies with the casino operators. For instance,
during this drought and the one in 1977, water
was not served in restaurants and such unless
you asked for it. Yet at the time I recall being
in one of the hotels, where they constantly
ran the water in the bar. And here we were
at home, putting bricks in our toilets and
restricters on our showers. But the tourists
are not even familiar with the problem, and
are not interested, and how can you expect
them to be?

My attitude long before I was elected
and through today is that people who are
responsible for making those kinds of
decisions in the community—in this case the
Reno City Council —should not ever allocate

Barbara Bennett

growth of any kind that is in excess of the
resources that are available to them. If they
have 1,200 acre-feet of water, and they allocate
it all to one project, then what should happen?
In my opinion, if they think that project is so
important, but they have nothing to allocate,
then they shouldn’t approve anything more
until the purveyor of water has x-number
more gallons of water in the area.

I was so active for so many years, sometimes
at the expense of family gatherings—especially
when I was mayor. I really needed to get back
to the family and have more time with my
grandkids and with everyone. I needed less
political involvement in my life. You really
get a bit burned out after all the years, but I
maintain an absolute interest in politics, in the
people who serve in office, and government
at all levels.

I have very strong opinions as far as my
political philosophy is concerned, and it has
probably been apparent throughout this entire
oral history. I have a personal philosophy to
live by: I have always refused to do anything
that would make me feel uncomfortable or
that I would not like myself for. if I can’t like
myself, I don’t think anyone else can like me.
I’ve tried to be fair, honest, and caring. I care
about a lot of things and a lot of people. I think
that as Americans, it’s our responsibility to
care about others, so when we can contribute
to organizations or causes that we feel are
important, we do so.

Philosophically, I’m a fiscal conservative,
obviously, because I’ve always had to be. In
my personal life I’m also fiscally conservative.
I believe that an elected official has a
responsibility to handle the public’s money
as carefully and as wisely as they’re willing
to handle their own, so I’m conservative in
that sense. I’m conservative about some other

things that I’ve taken some heat over, [laughs]
I can recall when we had this really high
unemployment dear back in the late 1970s,
early 1980s, and we had a lot of aliens coming
into the country. I know what the Statue of
Liberty says, and we’ve always opened our
arms to people from other countries. But at
that time I felt-and said so publicly-that it was
very unwise to bring in all of these people at
that time when we did not have the means for
looking after our own.

I believe that a country is only as strong
as its people are willing to make it strong, if
you destroy a country from the inside out—if
you have so many poor; so many unhoused; so
many people who lack medical care; so many
people who work, only to never get that other
foot up the ladder—you have a population
that may not be there when you need them
some day. if you want these people to fight
for this country, believe in it, work for it, to
speak positively of it, then every segment of
our society is entitled to the same respect and
the same opportunities. I’m sorry to say that I
still don’t believe that they all are. I think there
are a lot of things that need to be worked on,
and if that’s a liberal attitude, I certainly make
no apologies for it.

One of the main problems I have with the
Reagan administration is that they say that we
have not structurally harmed the country, but
I disagree-I believe that we have. If you have
a country where the infrastructure is falling
apart... The government is not putting up the
monies out of a trust fund to take care of the
highways, for example. I don’t believe that the
philosophy of our founding fathers was to do
away with a lot of things that belong to the
people by selling them off to private industry.
It’s certainly not my philosophy. If something
is owned by the people, it ought to stay m
the hands of the people, unless they give the

Epilogue

government permission to do otherwise.
Our system of government unfortunately
does not say that it’s necessary to go to the
public and ask them if they want to sell part
of their public parks so someone can chop
timber, or put a housing unit in. I feel very
strongly about those things. Infrastructure
also includes things like water. The entire
West, especially, is in the midst of one of the
worst droughts ever experienced in history,
and obviously something has to be done to
solve the water problems. Local governments
cannot afford it, so help has to come from the
federal government, in my opinion.

On the national level, taxes have been
reduced, and I suppose you can make a
successful argument for that if you’re talking
in certain areas. Some people have certainly
been helped a lot more than others. But I
believe that the upper strata of people in this
country have been helped far more than the
middle class or the lower middle class under
the Reagan administration. That’s inarguable.
Things hurt. They want to take government
off the backs of people? Well, they don’t mind
putting government on the people’s backs in
certain ways, like wire taps and forced testing
for drugs. I believe if our constitution says
anything, it says that those things are illegal. I
can say that knowing full well how important
it is to deal with the drug problems in the
country. But when you’re willing to wiretap
and to see the kinds of things that we’ve
seen in Washington with people personally
benefiting.... Those all really run against my
philosophical cord.

If there were some way to be a part of the
political scene and decision-making process
while still fulfilling my other responsibilities,
I would still like very much to be involved.
But I have no guilt about not being involved,
because we all have our priorities. When our

kids were growing up, John and I would tell
them, “Your family is everything. You’ve got
brothers and sisters in school. Look after
them, because you’re going to have your
family your whole life. It’s the only thing in
your life that is going to be constant if you
will let it be.”

Original Index:
For Reference Only

In order to standardize the design of all UNOHP transcripts for the online database, they have
been reformatted, a process that was completed in early 2012. This document may therefore differ
in appearance and pagination from earlier printed versions. Rather than compile entirely new
indexes for each volume, the UNOHP has made each transcript fully searchable electronically. If
a previous version of this volume existed, its original index has been appended to this document
for reference only. A link to the entire catalog can be found online at http://oralhistory.unr.edu/.

Barbara Bennett

Armstrong, Leola, 107
Associated General Contrac¬
tors (AGC) (Reno), 80, 82,
83

Bryan, Richard "Dick," 95,
96,97

Business and Professional
Women (BPW) (Reno),
23-24

Benet, Merle, 106
Bennett, Barbara: ances¬
tors/family, 1-3, 4-7, 8, 11;
childhood/youth, 2-11, 21;
education, 9-10, 21-22;
employment, 8-11,17-20,
99-104; marriage/family,
13-16, 17, 35, 126, 128-129;
as mayor/city council
member, 47-97
Bennett, John, 13-15, 52-53
Bennett, Sherry, 32
Biglieri, Clyde, 54, 74
Blue Ribbon Task Force
Report (1974), 37-38
Bode, Ken, 28
Brunette, B

Cashell, Bob, 96
Casino industry. See Gaming
industry; individual casinos
Cherches, Chris, 61
Citizen Policy Planning Advi¬
sory Committee (Reno), 76
City manager office (Reno),
61-62

Civil Service Con
(Reno), 66
Common

Archie," 104-
(Newton) family, 56

131

Original Index: For Reference Only

Day, Kevin, 89
DeCosta, Marge, 23
Defense industry (World
War II), 10-11
Democratic/Republican
party politics, 114-115
Dibitonto, Sam, 24
Discrimination, 18, 19-20, 22-
23, 26

Dodge, Carl F., 108
Durant, Marcel, 74

Eadington, Bill, 41-42, 88
Eckert, Richard, 38
Economic Development
Authority of Western
Nevada (EDAWN) (Reno),
89

Equal Rights Amendmeni
(ERA), 29-32, 33
Etchemendy,

55-56,5!

Fahrendorf, Bob, 101
Falcon’s Nest condominiums
(Reno), 71

Fitzgerald, Lincoln, 51
Ford, Jean, 27
Francis, John, 75
Francis, Steve, 94, 95
Frazzini, Mary, 23, 27

Gaming industry (Reno), 51-
52, 64, 67-71, 74, 90-91,
122-124

Giraud, Florence, 33
Gojack, Mary, 27, 28, 54
Gold Dust hotel-casino
(Reno), 68

Gomes, Nancy, 23, 27
Granata, Bill, 48-49, 75
Greene, Stan, 76

Hall, Jerry, 58
Handelsman, Mark
Hansen, Ja
Harrah’s

112-113
on family, 1-2
Housing (Reno), 22-23, 43-44
Howard, David, 94-95
Hunter, Robert, 85

King, Martin Luther, 22

Las Vegas, Nevada, 123
Lauri, Nick, 55
League of Women Voters,
25-26

Lear, Moya, 72
Lehners, Florence, 82
Lerude, Warren, 51-52
Lewis, Pat Hardy, 55

Barbara Bennett

Mapes hotel-casino (Reno),
91

Martin, Bernice, 66
Martinelli, Ernie, 65
McClelland, Joe, 54, 59, 76,
95

McGee, Chuck, 100,101
Meiser, Vera, 89
Menicucd, Bruno, 41, 48, 50-
51, 56, 74, 75, 76
MGM Grand Hotel (Reno),
68-69, 70

Miller, Maya, 23, 28
Moon, Bill, 94
Myers, Bill, 65

National Judicial College
(University of Nevada-
Reno), 103

Nevada Bell (Reno), 18,

Nevada State
Ethics,

Nevada 'state Youtn services
ion (Carson City), 99-

Northera Nevada Mobile
Homeowners Association
(Reno), 33-35

Oaks, Ed, 41, 67, 75
Osgood, Ted, 94
Outland, Orland, 106

Peters family, 1-3
Peters, Norma, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-7,
8, 11, 53

Pine, Janice, 56, 67, 75, 79,

Politics: Nevada, 26-32, 34-
35, 111-117; Reno city, 24-
25, 29, 34, 37-97, 121
Prindiville, Gerald, 106
Proposition 6 (Reno), 91-92

Race Relations Center
(Reno), 22-23
Rancho San !

issue, 54
Regions

leno-5

sportation

(Reno), 57-58
sid, Harry, 113
Reno City Council, 29, 41-42,
44-45, 48-49, 54, 55-56, 60-
63, 67-68, 70-72, 74-77, 78-
80, 82-88, 94

Reno Commission on the
Status of Women, 24
Reno, Nevada, 22-24; city
govemment/elections in,
24-25, 29, 34, 37-97, 121;
development/growth in, 37-
39, 40-44, 49, 56-57, 59, 64-
77, 83, 85-86, 87-88, 92-93,
94-95, 119, 122, 123, 124;
economic diversification in,
88-91, 121-122; gaming
industry in, 51-52, 64, 67,
71, 74, 90-91, 122-124;

Original Index: For Reference Only

housing in, 22-23, 43-44;
water resources in, 37-39,
68-69, 74-75, 120, 125-126
Reno Planning Commission,
66-67, 94-95, 120
Republican/Democratic
party politics. See
Democratic/Republican
party politics
Richter, Don, 48
Robertson, Joe, 105, 106
Romo, Carlos, 66, 101

Wagner, Sue, 112
Wallace, Bill, 44-45, 49, 67,
76

Washoe County Commission,
37-39 40 41

Waugh,' Eleanor "Ellie,” 27
Weinberg, Barbara, 75
Western Industrial Nevada
(WIN) (Reno), 89
Wilson, Bonnie, 48
Wishart, Kathryn, 94, 95
Wolfe, Hans, 89-90

Vucanovich, Barbara, 27, 28-
29, 45, 71, 113-114

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